


Star Trek Blackwell: Omen

by Kyt Dotson (Amerist)



Series: Star Trek Blackwell [1]
Category: Star Trek
Genre: Gen, Medical, Mystery, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2020-11-28 13:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 42,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20967641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amerist/pseuds/Kyt%20Dotson
Summary: Introducing Lt. Omen (the main character) and her job on Acheron Station as an operations officer tasked with safety on board a station in the middle of a subspace anomaly, next to a black hole, on a station that is filled with eccentric scientists doing what they do best: making a crisis out of everything.As with every book in the Star Trek Blackwell series, something is about to go terribly wrong.  It features alarms going off -- lots of alarms. Also, a foreshadowing introduction to the nature of the medical emergency on board.





	1. A day in the life of an anomaly

**Author's Note:**

> "Star Trek Blackwell: Omen" is the first fanfiction book in a series about the U.S.S. Blackwell, a Starfleet Medical science ship tasked with dealing with the most hazardous and most weird medical mysteries discovered by the Federation. The Blackwell, named after the first woman to receive a medical license in the United States during the 19th Century, only arrives on scene when nobody else is able to handle a medical emergency and provides high-level support for evacuations, humanitarian support and logistics for large-scale disasters. The vessel also has a compliment of highly skilled medical specialists and experts, along with equipment and resources often found only on star base and planetary facilities.
> 
> The setting is sometime after the Iconian War reaches its conclusion and it includes no major canonical characters -- although it does mention them time to time as they are legendary celebrities in universe.

Somewhere an alarm was going off.

Since beginning her new post on Firebase Acheron, known to the map makers at Federation stellar cartography as Anomaly Research Station 77, Lieutenant Octevia Jennifer Omen could set her schedule by alarms. Today she had an alarm right before breakfast, an alarm that interrupted lunch and now an alarm that would mean delaying dinner.

Omen keyed in the comm on the panel in front of her with one hand and the other fluttered over the interface to bring up details about the alarm. Whoever designed the interface originally thought that a single orange blinking light and a plaintive buzz would suit every user.

"Omen to Zal," she said and frowned at the screen. She didn't wait for him to acknowledge and started speaking the moment she heard the communicator link up. "That security seal in Iota lab is telling me that acting up again. There's a light on my console and I can't go off shift until its off."

Zal's gravely voice grated over the commlink. "Isn't that seal behind two other security seals? Why don't you send Kanagaki this time. I'm on the opposite side of the station from Iota."

Omen's fingertips danced across the panel to her left and a display spun up a map. Indeed, Zal was in the opposite quadrant of Acheron, closer to the practical field research labs and very far away from the physical research labs. She quickly considered bringing Kanagaki onto the line, but it looked like he was working in one of the cargo bays -- probably working on the inspection assignment she put him on this morning.

Omen pursed her lips. Dinner could wait. "No need," she said. "I'll put myself down for checking this one out. It's the same seal as before, Doctor Gantry is probably already expecting a visit."

"Check Kanagaki's notes on the last two times, I think he hit it with a hyperspanner and that resolved it last time."

"I'll do that. Omen out."

Omen sighed and pushed her chair back. When she stood, it quickly collapsed emitting a soft mechanical buzz and became a vertical silver bar that then recessed into the floor without a fuss. After her chair stowed itself, she stretched and scanned her office while she prepared herself for the three-hundred step journey to the Iota artifact lab.

As offices went, it was fairly nicely sized for someone who ran an operations team. Instead of a desk, Omen had opted for a wall of consoles and displays fashioned into an elliptical semicircle. Along with her, surprisingly comfortable, recessing chair, she could slide around the space and access any console-display combination she wanted. And, although her single chair would normally face the door out, there was only one chair and that tended to reduce visitors.

Her workstation locked and powered down as the door _wooshed_ open and revealed a standard-issue Federation starbase corridor. The beveled walls and their bulkhead sections whisked by with a well-regulated cadence as Omen walked. She counted her strides as she went in a memory of her military training on Andoria. The carpeted floor and the smell of the CO2 reclamation felt much kinder on her feet than the rocks and snow of her old training ground and less harsh on her nose than the freezing clipping wind filled. Still. her mind went back to her lessons during idle moments.

Most of the operations deck was situated closer to the center of the research station -- which was shaped something like a tube with various extending from it. Almost every location on the station had two routes to it: one that was mostly on foot, involving passing through gravity tubes and corridors; and a second that was as simple as walking to a turbolift and riding it to the nearest exit.

One of the few corridors that led into Iota Lab was only six hundred paces away from Omen's office. The alarm didn't signify any urgency, there was no need to go "soft" and use the turbolift. So back to training her mind went.

"Little soldier, oftentimes you will discover that problems have extremely simple solutions. " her old instructor, Shrihral, said in the memory, a grizzled andorian man with a severe gaze and an even more severe voice. In the memory, she could see him sighting a target with his steel-grey eyes, the blue skin of his face wrinkled with age and the single blue antenna on the right side of his skull protruding from his well-kept snow-white hair. "Also, you may discover that very simple things can cause extremely complex problems."

Omen looked at her feet for a moment, curling wisps of crystalline ice dust swirled around the subtle grey soles of her boots. Mere minutes earlier, her weapon had misfired while she drilled for firing after a short sprint and a hard stop. At worst, Omen feared she might miss the target entirely -- her phaser blowing out its emitter did not even enter her mind.

Shrihral nimbly repaired the rifle while she watched. "As much as I'd like to give you a lesson in proper weapon care," he said, "I think this is a good time to talk about discipline. This happened because you didn't pay attention to a very simple thing -- your power relay. I suspect it's failed before. One failure, that's not a problem, but several failures and you may want to look into what's causing it."

He finished with the phaser and reset the panel he'd opened to access its insides. With one deft motion, he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted and fired -- a plume of blue light flared around the target.

"Looks fine now, may even fire properly again and again," he said as he flipped the rifle and then tossed it to Omen who caught it reflexively. "But eventually it will fizzle like that again because that relay is still bad. Keep this in mind in life. Whether your equipment" -- he tapped the rifle in her hands -- "or team" -- he tapped a knuckle aside his temple -- "always look for what lies behind the problem."

As Omen turned into a branch of corridor that lead directly to the nearest entrance to Iota she mused that for this time of station-side "evening" there really should have been more people walking down the corridor. She hadn't passed anyone during her trek. This wasn't entirely odd, scientists and researchers tended to be homebodies to their labs, but everyone had to eat sometime.

Next to the entrance to Iota Lab was a holographic window displaying a (perhaps realtime) model of the Kersting Subspace Anomaly. For the fact that most of the anomaly -- especially from the outside, where most people saw it -- looked like a light-years wide ion storm.

Inside the anomaly, however, where Firebase Acheron orbited, things would appear quite different. Only a few hundred thousand kilometers away, a subspace traversing singularity punched through space-time itself and reality bent around it along crumpled angles. Torrents of highly energetic particles and deadly radiation geysered from it like an invisible pulsar. Acheron's orbit kept it safely out of these dangerous corridors of unbound cosmic energies, but their effects were still visible everywhere.

Gravitational flux and quantum subspace fluctuations spilled through all empty space around the station and, where they intersected, scintillating formations would blossom like multicolored prismatic aurora borealis. The kaleidoscopic collisions of particles and forces created a riot of effects, a visual pandemonium, that flummoxed unaided sentient eyes as well as computerized instruments alike. 

This was the reason Firebase Acheron had very few direct-to-space portals -- not simply because the simple idea of a window represented a potential structural weakness, force field reinforcement aside. The swirling, chaotic beauty of the anomaly outside the windows could mesmerize even the most logically minded. Certainly, Omen considered the anomaly beautiful, even as she acknowledged that a single warp field or force field failure and the nearby bulkhead would not save anyone from the strange universal forces racing past the hull like the breath of an angry, insane god.

The ever-present sound of the station changed here, so close to one of the edges of the habitation tube that made the structural center of the complex; the thrum of plasma conduits gave way to the more subtle sound of air forced through life support vents. The artifact labs, including Iota, were built into rings that extended away from the main bulk of the station. In part, this design was to make the labs easy to isolate if something catastrophic happened; it also worked to allow for careful regulation of power feeds, force field composition and fine-tuning of warp fields to protect the labs and the station separately from the weird forces subjected by the anomaly.

"Access to Iota Labs granted for Lieutenant Omen, Department of Operational Safety," the on-board computer said as she approached the door. The lights ringing the circular bulkhead portcullis shifted from amber to green and the steel grey doors tilted away like the wings of a scarab beetle -- although it only looked like one door opening, from her side, the bulkhead door consisted of three separate doors, each with their own separate structural integrity field.

The sound of the doors opening reminded Omen of a bunch of knifes all being sharpened all at once. Perhaps not as comforting as it should have been, as the function of these doors kept the entire station safe in the event of an emergency.

She let that particularly pleasant thought as she crossed the threshold and listened once again to the sound of those knives becoming ever sharper.

The area beyond opened into a long, straight corridor covered with sensor blisters and various scrubbers -- including something like a sonic shower head, a low-level force field projector that made Omen's skin tingle every time she passed and an anti-polaron field emitter that nobody (not even the Iota lab researcher) could explain what it was needed for.

In fact, when Omen came to the station six months ago, she'd discovered numerous pieces of "safety equipment" that needed maintenance but somehow lacked documentation as to function. And, when pressed, the researchers who requested it would often just mumble something about some other researcher who used it in some other situation, or the original researcher didn't work there anymore and nobody thought to remove it or shut it down.

The bulk of Iota Lab existed as a giant honeycomb of sectioned off cell labs: self-contained rooms with their own power supplies, field generators, replicators for general lab equipment and, in some cases, airlocks and interlocks for delivery and expulsion of hazardous materials. Access to each of these cell labs came from an ever-branching network of smaller corridors with metallic floors that clacked under her feet as she walked and gleamed bright reflections everywhere as she moved.

An odd sensation passed through Omen's skull as she walked into the room. For a moment, she felt the unpleasant stinging of icy wind on her cheeks and her fingers, numbed by sudden cold, reflexively reached for the ceremonial knife holstered at her wrist. When her fingers found nothing, she stopped herself -- she wasn't on Andoria, she did not carry the knife here.

Something triggered an adrenaline spike -- something was subtly wrong -- and she instinctively felt the need to arm herself.

The room before her was an antechamber that provided operational space for secretaries and logistics officers who supported the researchers who worked further back within the honeycomb of labs. Aside from the fading echos of Omen's boots on the metal floor and the interlacing buzz of different field generators and self-contained life support there was no other sound. 

Strangely, none of the researcher operational team was at their desks up front. The series of ordinary offices lined the antechamber that split off towards the honeycomb of labs should have been manned by at least six people.

"Omega? Where is everyone?" Omen said out loud as her eyes slid over empty office chairs and unaccompanied consoles. Every department on Acheron had an artificial intelligent agent to run basic computer operations, all of the practical research labs -- Iota, Tau, Rho, Sigma and Mu Storage -- were covered by Omega.

The hologram of a tall, middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair wearing science division blue "beamed" in to her right. Omega raised his chin once fully integrated and raised a thin, well-manicured hand to his chin.

"It is good to see you, Lieutenant," he said and gestured toward a hallway behind him that was marked with ascending red numbers. "The staff have gathered on the exotic matter observation deck. I believe they are waiting for you."

Omen quickly consulted her wrist-mounted display and pulled up a holographic map. "That's right next to the access point for the malfunctioning security seal. Did someone say why they went there?"

"I was not informed."

She briefly felt the familiar tickle of windblown ice crystals sting her cheeks as she glanced over at Omega. Perhaps it wasn't too unusual that people not inform the AI of office goings-on, but a staff gathering should have garnered some sort of passing comment to the computer.

Omen didn't reply to Omega, instead she shrugged and headed towards the exotic matter lab's observation deck. As she strode down the hallway, the chill followed along, a sensation that brought with it danger and exhilaration -- the brisk touch of Andoria.

The corridor was empty and all she could hear were the hushed sounds of life support and distant computer systems working away, the closer she got, another sound entered her perception -- a gentle vibration, a pulsation that emanated from the floor like surf crashing against distant rocks. She recognized it as the thrum of the working twinned warp cores in the middle of the lap, designed to produce parallel, entangled warp bubbles that were spun around each other in polarized alignment to isolate the subspace domains within the exotic matter lab from the rest of the station and the anomaly outside.

Omen glanced at the lab access doors as she passed, the doors were lettered from A to L switching sides of the corridor as she passed. The floor inclined upwards and curved deeply to the right, spiraling upwards. Only a few meters after lab access L, she found the interlocking double-doors marked "OBSERVATION DECK FLOOR 1."

The lights on the door panel indicated it was still locked. Curious, Omen flipped her wrist over, revealing an interface on her sleeve and with rapid finger movements she keyed in her override code. The door buzzed for a moment, considering, and tapped softly a few times before it _wooshed_ open to reveal --

"Congratulations Lieutenant Omen!" said Lt. Cmdr. Visco, one of his freckled hands offered her a tall glass filled with a pungent-smelling red liquid -- probably a synthehol fruit punch. Visco, a tall human man with a long face and even longer experience on the station, could have been one of Omen's favorite commanding officers. His hands-off approach to her job made her feel in charge, even out here in the abyss she'd been exiled to.

"Congratulations for..." Omen began to say and then she noticed a banner hanging from the ceiling above all the amassed faces -- most of them members of her own staff with a few station scientists sprinkled in -- that read: "Omen's six-month milestone."

Faces milled about watching her, some drinking their own punch or various pastries that had been placed on tables around the room. She felt very self-conscious for a moment, with every eye in the room looking to her -- she suppressed the need to go check the safety seal, but she suspected it wasn't broken. Near the back of the room she noticed Ens. Kanagaki, who would have fixed it (yet again) if she had not decided to do it herself tonight.

At least she'd get the dinner she almost skipped.

Omen put her lips together and took the glass from her commander. He grinned jovially and nodded as if to tell her she was stuck with the party, whether she liked it or not. It explained everything, the empty corridors and front offices, why Omega faked being uninformed -- she saw his hologram mingling to her left -- and made it clear the alarm was a ruse.

"Good job sticking around, Lieutenant," said Lieutenant Karr Zal, a cardassian man only slightly shorter than Omen. People mistook his droopy eyes as inattentive, but he possessed a sharp mind and astute senses that she had learned to trust. It didn't hurt that Zal often backed her up when she suggested more intuitive or unorthodox solutions to their commander. "Sorry about the deception. Necessary to get you out here. You know."

Most new arrivals on Firebase Acheron didn't make it two months before pushing hard for a transfer, let alone six. For an ordinary Starfleet officer this would have been a major milestone, a sign that he or she had the durability to put up with the stress of a deep space assignment on an isolated station in the middle of chaos.

Except -- Omen was no ordinary officer. She had been banished to this station after being demoted after one of her unorthodox solutions turned into a tragic accident. Here she was, a cast-off waiting to get back into the good graces of Starfleet. Less extraordinary and more a misfit, suddenly misaligned from her could-have-been stellar career on track to become a captain.

So, here she was, in the middle of an anniversary party, holding a glass of fruit punch, wishing she could be someplace else -- or at least, that someone would move out of her way so she could pick up a plate of food.

Hunger overshadowed her other interests and she moved getting fed up in her queue. A figure near Omen moved towards her but she dodged, food first, talk later -- she didn't see who it was -- but before she made it to the table with the plates she felt her foot come down on something not like floor. Cold jolted through her leg as it felt as if the floor gave beneath her shoe, like boots landing on brittle ice -- and the chill stung her cheeks.

Omen frowned.

"Hungry aren't we," said Lt. Elizabeth Moir, a petite, intense human woman with brown skin and elaborately shaved patterns crisscrossing through her hair. Omen recognized her as the figure who moved to interact with her earlier, she was a pleasant woman -- she was careful with her words and rarely engaged in small talk. Omen appreciated her efficiency of movement and speech.

She added, "Thanks for sticking around, Omen, place wouldn't be the same without you."

Omen felt an edged, numb cold wind through her fingers like an errant breeze. Forgetting to respond to Moir, she glanced at her hand uncertain of what this meant. There could be no emergency, the safety seal wasn't malfunctioning, she checked the interface on her arm and the alarm was off -- whoever had set it off had corrected it already.

"Maybe I should check that seal," she said turning away from the table piled with food towards the back of the room -- more faces turned towards her as people looked to greet her, but Omen's mind drifted.

"No need," Moir said, shaking her head as she moved to grab one of the plates from the table. "That alarm was triggered by Omega with Zal's help in order to get you to come out here. Perhaps you should have some food."

"Something's still off," Omen said, suddenly the food didn't hold her attention as it did a moment before -- her hunger withdrew from the bracing cold swirling in the air.

"Lieutenant, I know you don't like parties, but you don't need to worry about--" Visco said from behind her but he was cut off by gasps from a nearby gathering of coworkers.

A plate of food hit the floor and a glass thudded on the carpet, red fluid splashing over the dull grey material. Kanagaki had fallen to the floor, his hands curled up like he was gripping onto something, and his body began convulsing. Sharp lines of light, like arcs of electricity, danced up his legs and across his arms, spider-webbing across his body as it shook.

"What's going..." Zal said reaching down towards the fallen ensign.

"Back, get back!" Omen yelled as she pulled Zal away and hit her communicator badge.

"Omen to sickbay," she said. "Medical emergency in the exotic matter lab; send medics and transport immediately."

"Sickbay here," a voice responded. "We're dispatching medics now. There's been three other reports of medical emergencies in the last minute. Can you report?"

Kanagaki's body continued to luminesce, less violently now, and the convulsions appeared to have subsided. The patterns flickering over his skin, she could see now, appeared to trace the anatomical paths of his nervous system -- the sharp arcs of light appeared to emanate from inside him, silhouetting bones, muscles and tendons like twisting red structures, turning over into themselves surrounded by nimbuses of rippling light.

"Ensign Kanagaki is unconscious and convulsing," Omen said. She pulled out her engineering tricorder and waved for people near her to head to the exit of the room. Her colleagues had already taken over the duty of guiding people out, talking to people as they exited -- the sound of receding footsteps and confused voices burbled on the periphery of her hearing as she reported. "He appears to have been struck by some form of energy, unknown origin. My tricorder is...useless. These readings don't make any sense."

Somewhere, her commander was speaking to her. A hand touched her arm and pulled her back -- Omen felt like she could see something, a pattern, but it was incomplete.

Medical staff arrived at the doors and rushed in carrying medical kits and stasis equipment. They quickly herded the remaining people out of the room and came towards Omen and Visco -- and she let herself be guided away helplessly. She couldn't help him now.

She needed to go to sickbay -- or her office -- to figure out the situation. Dinner would have to wait.

"Regroup on the medical deck," she said as she ran past the remaining members of the Department of Operational Safety. "We have a job to do. It's time to earn our keep."


	2. The nature of the medical emergency

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The U.S.S. Blackwell, captained by the vulcan Spellaun, is diverted from its overhaul at Deep Space 5 to warp immediately to Firebase Acheron. News of a mysterious illness spreading through the station has been forwarded to Starfleet Medical and the starbase's extreme remoteness makes it difficult to get medical personnel on site rapidly.

“Incoming priority one communique from Starfleet Medical, sir,” said the communications officer on board the _U.S.S. Blackwell_ to his captain.

The _Blackwell’s _crew had been winnowed down to about half the compliment she originally launched with during her berth at Deep Space 5 for repairs and a refit of her systems. She wasn’t a very old ship, but some of her parts didn’t quite fit together, the _Blackwell-class_ had a checkered engineering history having been a prototype, pushed hot off the line to become a research vessel designed to help deal with the Borg threat and then the incursion of Species 8572 and most recently she’d served on the front lines of the Iconian war.

A floating hospital and support ship with state-of-the-art systems, the _Blackwell_ already had most of her weapon systems taken offline and folded into other systems designed to bolster her medical capabilities. Engineers deployed from the shipyards around DS5 were still crawling all through her decks, climbing down Jeffry’s tubes, and eating their lunch amid the cold, bulkheads in the belly of the beast.

She still had three weeks at berth before all the upgrades and repairs could be finished. However, a medical emergency could not wait, the ships half-vulcan, half-human captain surmised.

“On screen,” Capt. Spellaun said, shifting slightly in his captain’s chair. “Let’s see what Starfleet Medical needs of us.”

The view screen on board the bridge of the _Blackwell_ was shaped like a pillow with its corners pulled taut, giving it a sort of bent curvature that pulled at the eyes but didn’t distort the image that resolved in the middle. There, on the screen, the head and shoulders of a Starfleet admiral appeared. The captain immediately recognized the steel grey eyes set amidst a fan of wrinkles and the stern brow of the Starfleet Director of Emergency Response: Admiral Wynbine.

“Admiral,” Spellaun said. “What can we do for you?”

“Captain,” the admiral said. “The _Blackwell_ will be leaving Deep Space 5 on assignment. I need your ship and your crew on the way to the Kersting Subspace Anomaly at maximum warp as soon as you can leave dock. The research station we have posted there has contacted Starfleet Medical with an emergency and you are the only ship equipped to deal with it.”

Spellaun leaned forward in his seat, set the PADD in his hand down on the arm of his chair and quirked an eyebrow.

“Admiral,” he said. “You are aware that this ship is at half compliment and is still several weeks out on refit and repairs. We may not be ready to assist with any medical emergency.”

The admiral nodded on screen and waved her hand. “I am told that your warp engines are already refit and engineering personnel from DS5 have instructions to bring aboard extra equipment that you will need where you are going. You should be squared away within the next four hours and the moment you get the green light, I need you to clear moorings and get underway.”

“I see,” the captain said. He glanced down at the display panel on his chair and pulled up a status report.

Indeed, what the admiral said was true: the engineering teams on board were sewing up their current work tickets and withdrawing from the ship. Also, he saw a line item listing a large tonnage of equipment being hastily moved from DS5 and on board with all haste. The cargo bays would be a bit cramped until it could be unstowed and installed -- something Spellaun estimated would need to be done while underway.

“Can you brief me on the situation at” --the captain tapped at his display, pulling up the metadata Admiral Wynbine had attached to the subspace transmission-- “Anomaly Research Station 77?”

“We are sending you everything we know about the status of Firebase Acheron and the people on board,” the admiral said. “To summarize. Thirty-six hours ago, three crewmen were infected with some form of multiphasic neurogenic energy and became ill. Since then, six more crew members have been infected and as we understand it, the phenomena may have continued to spread. There are no deaths yet, but the station’s medical staff is unable to determine a cure or curb the spread -- in spite of a total quarantine and the fact that ARS77 is as remote as you can get.”

“Remote is an apt description of that region of space, Admiral,” Spellaun said. “I assure you, even at half crew the _Blackwell_ is more than equal to the task.”

“You will have to be,” Admiral Wynbine said. “The nearest medical team with half the expertise you have onboard is a week away at maximum warp. We’re counting on you. Wynbine out.”

The view screen dimmed for a moment and the admiral’s visage was replaced with the shadow-touched curve of Deep Space 5’s upper docking pylon. Bright lines sketched through the dark of space as work bees slid past on thrust, pulling away from the _Blackwell_, many would return to their hangars while others stayed on the hull of the ship to release the docking bolts that held the hull scaffolding in place. Distant, soft pops could be felt more than heard as the giant metal lattices were released from the hull and began to slowly swing away.

“Send the medical data from ARS77 to the exobiology department,” Capt. Spellaun said. “Place the data on the general access database and suspend all current projects. Exobiology will lead, but I want everyone to be versed in what we’re facing by the time we arrive.”

“Aye, sir,” the communications officer said, tapping away at his console. “Anything else?”

“Not at the moment,” Spellaun said. He grabbed up his PADD from the armrest and rose from his chair. “I will be in my ready room. Contact me when the master chief on DS5 sends the all-clear.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Spellaun’s kept his ready room spartan. Although he associated his achievements and credentials with the status they afforded him, therefore, the only adornment on the wall was the emblem he received when he graduated from the Vulcan Academy of Sciences -- a red threaded tapestry with the symbols of medicine and health painted onto it in metallic dye. An unnecessary decoration if he still worked on Vulcan, in the Academy of Archives, but here, among humans and other cultures it became a focal point for discipline. 

“Computer, display technical specs for the medical facilities on ARS77 on the left and data, categorized by analysis subjectivity, on the neurogenic epidemic on the right,” Spellaun said.

The interface on his desk beeped amiably, as most Federation technology was wont to do, and the screen filled with information. The technical docs for ARS77 were considerable, detailed and didn’t fit in the real estate allotted, even with Spellaun’s specialized interface with an increase refresh speed, it would be impossible to digest even a small portion of it in the time he had. The other side of the screen, however, appeared far more sparse.

Details about the nature and disposition of the epidemic were severely lacking. Although ARS77 had state-of-the-art Federation medical technology at its disposal, the neurogenic energy phenomena affecting the crewmen resisted conventional analysis and thus there were only reams of similar tricorder and medical bed scans to compare.

Unconventional analysis, however, caught the captain’s eye. Someone on ARS77 had decided to use research equipment on samples of the neurogenic energy -- bombarding it with various types of radiation in an attempt to get it to react within the confines of rapid-growth synthetic nervous tissue. The sub-item, which appeared by itself at the bottom of the subjectivity curve -- meaning that it was the most subjective and least accurate analysis -- sat by itself, a glaring and unprofessional asymmetry in the data.

“Computer,” Spellaun said. “Who ordered the metaphasic quasibaryon bombardment scans of the samples?”

“Bombardment sample tests were ordered and overseen by Lieutenant Octevia Omen, Department of Operational Safety.”

“Fascinating,” Spellaun said. Someone with no apparent medical training involved in attempting to diagnose a medical disorder on the station? That wasn’t entirely out of bounds for Starfleet personnel -- the organization did pride itself in trying to train people to improvise in the face of adversity -- but even then the nature of the culture rewarded conformity more often than not.

“Computer, please show me the Starfleet record for Lieutenant Omen.”

“Working,” the computer said.

* * *

Omen pressed the top of the self-sealing bolt on the lip of a newly installed quarantine hatch. Fitting to its name, the bolt shook for a moment and fixed itself in place.

It didn’t take much to isolate a section of the station. It was, after all, designed for need-to-be-contained experiments. This sort of need, however, exceeded the expectations even of the highly imaginative designers of the station. So far, whatever caused the illness, which as of yet had no name, to hop from person to person. Proximity, it seemed, did not matter, but the energy was found to permeate the areas where it was contracted.

As a result, Omen and her team set about isolating the areas where people became “infected.”

She would normally not have put herself on this sort of assignment -- putting on bolts was grunt-work -- but she’d made herself a little unwanted in the medical wing after a few choice comments.

It all started when Lieutenant Raddis disagreed with bringing some novel scanning equipment in from the exotic matter labs. Omen made the most logical argument she could about why the scanners in the quarantine sickbay would not be able to get the resolution -- or visibility -- needed to properly understand the illness. Omen had resolved herself not to shout at the man this time, he could be insufferable when he was right and stubborn when he was wrong.

Like most members of Starfleet Medical, Raddis felt like someone outside of his department couldn’t possibly know enough about how to treat medical patients so he pushed back.

But, Omen had him beat. She’d recently been working on exotic-matter scanning equipment that measured the spin of metaphasic quasibaryons. The equipment existed because a group of scientists in the Iota lab thought it would be “interesting” to get tight quasibaryon scans of some of the artifacts discovered in the anomaly. Omen didn’t know what kind of results they were getting, but something about the epidemic phenomena reminded her of the anomaly itself and it’s ever-shifting prismatic bands of chaotic light.

“Really wasn’t fair of Raddis to complain to Visco,” Ensign Coli said. A blue hand reached up from out of sight and handed Omen another self-sealing bolt. This would be the last one after it closed the hatch, the structural integrity field could extend across this bulkhead seamlessly and provide a secure quarantine. “I personally think you had the right idea, if people keep getting sick and our scanning equipment cannot actually detect what’s happening we need to think out of the box. I told Visco as much. He told me that he needed to get you out of sickbay before Raddis exploded. I say let him explode.”

As a bolian, Coli tended to talk a lot. Normally Omen didn’t mind that, if he was talking she didn’t need to say anything herself. In fact, he usually didn’t say anything all that critical most of the time and she could just focus on her work and only tune in on keywords. As she understood it, this sort of behavior was pretty common for bolians who grew up on their homeworld. An entire world of people who talked non-stop, she tried not to cringe at the thought.

The final bolt shook and sealed itself with a buzz and a _whirr_.

“Did you see the results?” Coli asked. “After you were sent out, I stayed behind just long enough to get a glance at the report. It looked a lot like what showed up on your tricorder in the beginning, and, you know what? I get this strange sensation that I’ve seen that pattern before. It reminds me of a time when I was out with my nephew and--”

Omen hit her comm badge. “Omen to Moir and Zal,” she said. “You can extend the structural integrity field now to complete the quarantine. The last hatch seals are in place and this deck is now inaccessible.”

Coli looked on silently as Omen descended back down the ladder and Zal replied over the comm that the field was about to extend.

Omen felt the hairs on her arms flutter and a gentle sizzle permeated the air nearby. The structural integrity field in this area would be reinforced with a type five force field, which meant that part of the aperture extended away from the bulkhead itself by at least a centimeter. The ladder was far enough away from the wall she wasn’t worried about touching it -- the worst it could do is a gentle zap, a reminder of the high-energy field there -- but she didn’t feel like getting that reminder.

“I get that I’m _persona non grata_ in sickbay right now,” Omen said to Coli. She slid her toolkit off her shoulder and handed it over to him, which he deftly took.

Compared to her, Coli was short, but not stout, his arms were lean and lacked much muscular definition. His eyes were always wide, like he felt eternally surprised about what was going on around him. In addition to his extremely talkative nature, Coli seemed to bear himself with an almost-paranoid hyperattention to his surroundings, which was borne out with equal attention to detail.

“But,” Omen continued. “Tell me more about what you saw on the screens after the scans were taken. I know that Raddis is thorough, but I think there’s a good chance there’s something he missed because he’s following Starfleet medical protocol instead of starting with what we know about living here in the anomaly.”

Coli’s smile nearly split his extremely blue face in two and he winked at her as she walked past. Behind her, she heard him remove his tricorder from his belt and pull it open.

“Would you believe,” he said, “that I downloaded the full report to my tricorder before they kicked me out of sickbay to join you in this assignment?”

“Show it to me,” she said.


	3. Welcome to the epidemic, Captain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The U.S.S. Blackwell and Captain Spellaun, the vulcan commander of the Blackwell, arrive on scene at Firebase Acheron. However, when it comes time for the captain to embark onto the station, something goes wrong. At the same time, Omen continues her investigation into the mysterious energy-illness affecting the crew of the station.

“Raddis told me not to talk to you,” Dr. Higgs hissed at Omen and her PADD. All the while Omen attempted vainly, and valiantly, to hand the PADD to Higgs, but her friend managed to fend off each attempt.

The interaction, possibly best described as a very calm, yet quiet, altercation, had started right inside of the first antechamber to the quarantine section of the medical deck. This area wasn’t exactly what the station staff would have called sickbay but anyone who was a stickler as to the meaning of “Get off the medical deck and don’t come back, Lieutenant,” would have expected she shouldn’t be here.

“Please look at this,” Omen said, also keeping her voice as low as possible -- not quite a whisper, but enough that someone walking by wouldn’t recognize her voice. 

Dr. Higgs, a towering, willowy specimen of humanity with long black hair and a round baby-face, folded her arms across her chest -- a gesture that reminded Omen of a tall, wading bird from Earth she’d seen in holorecordings: a flamingo. Higgs took in a deep breath and adjusted her infomatagraphic glasses -- a pair of broad-lenses set with thin microfimalments that projected holographic information over the vision of the wearer.

“Okay,” she said with a sort of quiet finality and made a gesture with her hand as if she were about to accept a wineglass. “Give me the PADD--”

Omen smiled and began to hand it over.

“--but!” Higgs said. “I am making no promises and you, and I _stress this_, cannot come onto this floor again until Dr. Raddis gives you permission.” Her fingers grabbed onto the PADD and, in a gesture of authority, pressed it against her hip. “Do you understand?”

“Stab an ice shard in my eye,” Omen said and nodded.

Higgs cringed but shook her head. “Okay. Sure, I guess that means ‘yes,’ but I don’t believe you.”

Omen allowed herself a wry smile and didn’t say anything. The saying was something that her old warfare instructor would say as a sort of promise, an oath, “If I should fail, stab an ice shard in my eye,” Shrihral would say, often then laughing so loud the roof would shake.

She opened her mouth to say something but her communicator chirped. She tapped it and said, “Omen here.”

The voice on the other end was Lt. Cmdr. Visco. “Lieutenant, your presence is requested at embarkation, a representative from Starfleet Medical is coming on board and has specifically asked that you join us. The captain of the _U.S.S. Blackwell_ will be on board in under ten minutes. Make your way here with due haste.”

“I’ll be there,” Omen said.

Higgs chuckled and leaned back on her heels. “Sounds like you’re popular today.” She shrugged and waved the PADD at Omen. “I’ve heard of the _Blackwell_, but I don’t know who her captain is...or why he or she wants to see you when you come on board.”

“I should probably get going then,” Omen said. “I shouldn’t be keeping the captain waiting.”

She turned on her heel and waved her friend goodbye. It wouldn’t take an entire ten minutes to get from the medical deck to embarkation, but her curiosity still sped her down the hallways a bit more swiftly than would have been necessarily appropriate.

* * *

The chill winds cut through the access corridor the moment Omen stepped through the adjacent bulkhead. She’d chosen this section because it cut around most of the bulk of the station and lead across the maintenance areas, which gave more immediate access to everything related to external operations, including cargo bays and embarkation.

One moment she felt the carefully temperature-controlled atmosphere of the station against her arms, with the gentle scent of the life support oxygen generators and a bouquet of smokey chemicals produced by molecules colliding with structural integrity fields. The next, Omen was embraced by the bracing cold of Andor, she could feel ice forming on her eyelashes, and the razor-edged smell of the arctic air itself. 

Omen kept her brisk pace but tapped her communicator. “Omen to Visco,” she said. “What’s going on over there?”

Visco answered, his words short and curt.“Lieutenant? You are almost late, the contingent from the _Blackwell_, including her captain, is expected to arrive within a few minutes. And there’s nothing else going --"

Like a brief memory, it felt as if ice had cracked beneath her feet.

Following the interruption in Visco’s speech, a klaxon alarm blared. The floor under Omen’s feet shuttered and an impact against a far-away bulkhead resounded. She steadied herself and glanced at the readouts on the wall, which had switched from pale blue to flashing red, matching an automatic alert level.

“Commander?” Omen said.

“An exotic matter wormhole just hit the shuttle,” Visco said. She could hear excited voices in the background and shouted commands as the alarm continued to wail. “It collapsed their shields and the warp bubble protecting it. Get here quickly.”

Omen quickened her pace.

She swiped open her wrist display and downloaded the sensor reports and the situation matrix. By now, technicians would already be at their stations developing information to deal with the unfolding incident. 

Within the eye of the storm, where Firebase Acheron sat, the interacting gravitational fields generated by the singularity created subspace eddies. These eddies would sometimes lead to the formation of multi-dimensional interstices and generate briefly lived wormhole bubbles. Once formed, the bubbles would evaporate quickly -- often within nanoseconds -- and those were relatively harmless; longer-lived bubbles, however, could last several seconds and would often leave behind strange objects. These could be extremely dangerous to human-habitat environments, such as the starbase or starships.

Looking at the telemetry for the shuttle, its course, and the point where it must have intersected the wormhole, Omen realized what had to be done.

Skidding to a stop, Omen checked her location in relation to the rest of the deck.

“Omega,” she said. “Please plot me the quickest path, running, from my current location to the controls for Doctor Iver’s subspace phasic graviton emitters.”

“On your display now,” Omega said.

After a momentary glance, Omen set off down the corridor. It would take her approximately three minutes to reach the controls at a conservative pace. She figured she could do it in two if she pushed herself.

“Still on the line with me, Commander?” Omen said.

“I am,” Visco said. “Why are you headed to Iver’s lab?”

“I can explain on the way,” she said. “Meanwhile, you have a warp field engineering specialist standing next to you. Please have Moir join the conversation.”

“She is,” Visco said. “Be quick, though, we need her for the rescue operation.”

She chimed in almost immediately. “Moir here. What can I do for you, LT?”

Omen let herself fall into a loping run and tried to use the artificial gravity to her advantage. Spring endurance training had been a big part of her time with her old military instructor on Andor and she felt she’d excelled at learning it. Still, even with the extra oxygen in the station than on Andor, she considered how likely it would be she could become winded.

“The current trajectory of the shuttlecraft is ballistic,” she said. “I assume you’re attempting to get them to do a hot restart on the nacelles to generate a warp bubble before using RCS thrusters to adjust course?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “It’ll get them killed. The telemetry shows their warp coils are now unstable and there’s no such thing as reliable suppression inside the anomaly without a stable warp field. We can tractor them in.”

All the excited voices on the comm line suddenly hushed and Visco spoke up. “We can’t tractor them after being hit by a wormhole,” Visco said. “The exotic matter will create a catastrophic breach -- you know that.”

“Not if the tractor beam uses a graviton beam set to the resonant signature of the exotic matter in the hull of the shuttlecraft,” Omen said. (Less than thirty seconds to a terminal that could connect to Dr. Iver’s laboratory.) “Moir, tell me that you can quickly determine that signature and send it to me.”

“Omen, I’m not sure that--” Visco started but Moir cut him off.

“I can do it, Commander,” she said. “The LT has a point, Iver was testing a new system for the Collectors to grab onto hull plates that contacted exotic matter from the anomaly for starbase repairs. That part of the project was abandoned...but it’ll work.”

“Wait! Why was it--” Visco tried, yet again to vainly get a word in.

“Thanks, Moir, I’ll contact you when I’m in position,” Omen said. “Out.”

Omega had already unsealed the bulkhead pressure doors that led into an auxiliary control room near the Iota Exotic Matter Labs so that Omen could run in without delay. The room would have been cramped for the staff of three that used to man this station and its consoles. For Omen, however, she was right at home.

The console came to life under her fingertips as she followed the warm-up sequence instructions on the emitters. As fortune had it, the installation of the graviton banks for Iver’s experiments had been the first equipment she oversaw when she first arrived at the station. It had been dirty, arduous work and involved many hours of staring at unnecessarily long-winded instructions detailing every convoluted option for tuning highly advanced graviton generators.

At the time, Omen thought her head would explode if she had to listen to yet-another Starfleet Engineering warp-field resonance lecture by some overexcited scientist just to understand how to synchronize the controls to the external equipment. Now, she could almost remember every single one of the stages that got the tractor beam array calibrated and...

A message appeared on her arm display -- updated telemetry on the endangered shuttle, an exotic matter resonant signature, and a note from Visco: “I’m trusting you to make this work.”

If Moir got her part done correctly this should go perfectly well. Until the emitter array overloaded the conduits it was connected to and an electro-plasma cascade blew out most of the power for this deck and the one above and below.

It would just be three decks, surely, Omen thought to herself. Apparently, Visco had somehow forgotten, this project was abandoned after half the station lost power during a power-up test.

“Omen to shuttlecraft.”

“Tulane here,” a voice said over the comm. “I’ve got Captain Spellaun and several very anxious ensigns with me, Acheron. I hope you’ve got a solution for me, I’m looking at the side of your extremely impressive space station and it’s getting bigger at sixty meters per second.”

“Just the facts please, number one,” a said a male voice in a deliberate baritone, the hallmark of a vulcan and probably the Captain.

“No time for introductions,” Omen said. “I am about to give you a port in this storm by throwing you a line, but it’s going to be a little rough. On my mark, use reaction systems and bring yourself about one-hundred and eighty degrees and then fire one impulse burst from your starboard engine one-eighth of a second.”

“Not sure if I’m reading you right, Acheron,” Tulane said. “Won’t that slam us right into the docking ring?”

“In a moment, I am going to grab you with a tractor beam,” Omen said. “So, either overcharge your inertial dampers or brace yourself with the nearest ensign.”

“Color me impressed, Acheron,” Tulane said. “If we survive this, first round in the mess is on me.”

“I will settle for a photograph of my commanding officer’s face,” Omen said. “Prepare for maneuver in three --” 

Her fingers danced across the console as she adjusted power settings and began the primary targeting sequence. The sensors attached to the tractor beam module were more sensitive than most and picked the tiny shuttle out of the wash of chaotic energies like spotting a leaf being tossed on the surface of a rapid-filled river.

“Two.”

Energy levels fluctuated in the array, Omen moved frantically to smooth them out and was forced to shut down a tertiary array component as power began to surge. Sensors had a hard time “seeing” in the soup that was the Kersting anomaly on the best of days and without a stable warp field protecting the shuttle, echos of its duranium hull reflected multiple sensor ghosts.

“One.”

An alarm on the panel began to cry, an unused EPS conduit in the primary array showed an overload in progress.

“Mark!” Omen triggered the graviton array before the targeting sensors made a final lock, a lock didn’t matter at this junction anyway because of interference from the anomaly, what she needed was to excite the exotic matter on the hull of the shuttle with the tractor beam and let that guide the primary array. White, fairy fan rays of light punched out from the side of the station and brushed the shuttle as it sped past -- they formed a net that caught the shuttle and it lit up on the sensors.

“Executing maneuver,” Tulane said.

Ripples of electromagnetic force expanded away from the tiny shuttlecraft as it spun hard on its axis that suddenly stretched into concentric teardrops as it lurched hard into the net formed by the graviton emitters. Now the shuttle was extremely visible to the sensors, targeting acquired and automatic systems took over, a single focused beam grabbed the vessel within its shimmering blue grip.

“Intertial dampers fai--” Tulane shouted. “Impulse offline, I am losing main pow--”

Communication cut off. Omen could hear the drum of her heart in her chest as she watched the shuttle telemetry from her arm display. It had started as a ballistic course -- right after the vessel struck the wormhole -- and then became a sharp curve that intersected abruptly with the station. Sharp, intangible cold filled her lungs.

There was no sound of something large slamming into a distant bulkhead. Instead, the console in front of her went dark -- a bright flash followed a loud bang and a shower of sparks when an EPS conduit overloaded overhead. An ominous sizzle could be heard from the hallway and then -- it was dark.

Indicators on her wrist display showed six decks without power. The cascade spread further than she expected but it wasn’t _entirely _catastrophic. Redundant systems and isolation protocols had saved nearby working labs and backups would deal with the rest. Ruptured power conduits would take days to repair and chances were good she would never hear the end of it. The station chief of engineering already didn’t like her very much -- this wasn’t going to help. 

In the dark and quiet, Omen’s mind stilled and she realized that what was broken now wouldn’t matter if her plan hadn’t been successful.

Almost in a panic, she reached for her communicator.

“Omen to shuttle! Please come in.”

“Moir here,” came the reply. “They’re here! The shuttle made it.”

“I applaud you on your competence in extreme situations,” the vulcan voice said. “Spellaun, captain of the _U.S.S._ _Blackwell_, are you the officer who just assisted my first officer?”

“That was me,” Omen said. As she spoke, she felt brief rime along her eyelashes followed by the gentle smell of new-fallen snow. Not the warning that adrenaline brought, but the almost-sense that the person on the other end of the comm had focused a considerable intent on her. “Lieutenant Octevia Omen.”

“Good,” Spellaun said. “Your assistance no doubt saved our lives. As you humans say, I am in your debt. Perhaps we can discuss at your earliest possible leisure. I would also like to better understand the reasoning behind your decision to use a quasibaryonic scan on the infected subjects.”

Visco cleared his throat nearby and said, “I’m sure the lieutenant can meet with you right after we square yourself and your crew away and show you to your quarters, sir.”

“I would prefer to see your sickbay, quarantine zone, and a workspace, Commander,” Spellaun said. “From the last report, your epidemic is accelerating. I have no time to delay. You may see the rest of my crew to their quarters.”

Just then, in the lull of conversation, a ceiling plate fell and crashed into the floor behind Omen. 

“I will be right up,” Omen said, as she tried to unhitch her shoulders.

She didn’t want to be here when the repair crews came through after all. Answering questions about the strange illness and her discoveries seemed like a better diversion than all of the paperwork that would follow, including the long talk she’d need to have with Cmdr. Visco about the day’s events.


	4. No relaxation in the time of plague

Omen didn’t know what to expect from this man, this vulcan, when she walked into Lt. Cmdr. Visco’s office in the upper ring of Acheron. Even before she crossed the threshold of the door, she felt as if she had stepped into a blizzard.

Capt. Spellaun’s gaze slammed into her like a physical force, threatening to drive her back through the door. His dark eyes, like steel portals, reminded her of the eyes of the headmistress of the military school on Andor, Maven Zettia sh’Querros. She could speak volumes without parting her lips, a woman who caused her own instructor — a man of few, but pointed, words — to carefully watch his language.

In spite of the intense scrutiny, Omen stepped through the doors and listened to them whisk closed behind her. Vulcans bothered her, a people who pursued pure logic without emotion or passion — she wondered if the emotions that bubbled inside of her gave the captain pause as he looked through her.

Although she had been taught to still her heart with the ice and chill of her homeworld around other humans in Starfleet, Omen felt the spark of rebellion rise in her chest. Even Lt. Cmdr. Visco had never stared her down so intently. In school, if a peer — or even a person a mere rank above her — gave her such a look it would be a challenge to her honor and she had been taught to reply. Violently if necessary; but in accordance with the Ushaan, a unified code of honor inherent to Andorian culture.

Yet, just like a vulcan, there was no violence in Spellaun’s expression. Instead, Omen sensed bleak, emotionless judgment — the judgment of a snow capped mountain or a winter storm. An act of pure intent, like an automatic sensor sweep, watching with a practiced, patterned rigor. His eyes efficiently took her in, from the grey dust on her pants legs to the unkempt strands of hair that had sprung up from her encounter with falling debris in the control room.

For a human, Spellaun would have been considered a tall man, but Omen stood slightly taller than average for a human at six feet, as did Visco. And, just like a vulcan, he had visible muscles cut through the trim of his shirt and pants, a consequence of the higher gravity of his homeworld and clearly his own physical fitness training regimen. His face was lean, seemingly without rounded edges, which only added to the severity of his apparent lack of expression as his steel-grey eyes watched her flatly. Like most vulcans, he had short-cut hair cropped around his pointed ears.

As if someone had run off a template for a vulcan, stamped it with a Starfleet logo and dressed it in a red command uniform, it stood in front of her now with the silence of a granite statue.

His expression did not change as she walked into the room, but his gaze followed her unerringly as she moved from the door and came to a stop in front of her commander’s desk.

“You requested my presence, Commander,” Omen said.

Spellaun’s intense gaze ended as abruptly as it began and he said one word — and with that word the storm broke.

“Andorian.”

Omen’s eyes flashed, the spark of rebellion threatened to ignite into a raging fire in her chest. Her childhood on the icy moon of Andoria and her adoptive family would have been part of her Starfleet personnel file but that would be no reason to say that. 

Instead, Omen relaxed and let the winter flame of her heart settle, and listened to her own voice deadpan the only thing she felt safe saying aloud.

“Sir?”

The captain’s expression changed, a brief flicker of almost-confusion crossed his lips that he caught and smoothed. He lifted a hand to his chest and nodded.

“Of course, I forgot the importance of human rituals of correspondence and context,” he said. “I mean no offense. It is clear to me that you have adopted significant aesthetics from your family. You dye your hair white and it is molded in Andorian fashion. But, you seem to have thinned follicles in the same cranial region a biological andorian would have antenna. You do this because it honors your family?”

“A childhood accident, sir,” she said without hesitation. This was a lie, a well-practiced lie with enough of the truth that its verisimilitude made it undetectable by even the most sensitive equipment and people. Some secrets needed to stay secret.

Spellaun nodded as if this was a sufficient answer.

During most of the conversation, Visco remained silent. He shifted, apparently sensing the tension in the conversation and decided to break in.

“Now that introductions are out of the way,” Visco said. He put his hands together and gestured to one of the many chairs around the room. “Perhaps we can get to more official business. We have crew incapacitated and with our captain and first officer off station, Special Operations is in charge and that means I oversee everything. The lieutenant is at your disposal, Captain.”

“Of course,” the captain said. “I merely saw a medical anomaly and thought it would be useful to explore it. In fact, I have discovered many anomalies about you, Lieutenant Omen, that I believe will make you indispensable in this current crisis, which is why I have asked your superior officer to bring you here.”

“Thank you. I think.” Omen said, glancing at Visco. “What is it that my anomalous self can do for you?”

“I have reviewed the medical records of the epidemic sent to Starfleet Medical and one thing about the data stood out in particular,” the captain said. “Why did you choose to use a quasibaryonic scanner on one of the patients?”

Visco visibly stiffened at the question. No doubt he recalled reading every angry complaint from the medical staff — in particular Raddis — but to his credit, he simply pursed his lips and steepled his fingertips. Omen suspected that if the captain of the medical research ship specifically tasked with saving his crew wanted to know why one of his own lieutenants was essentially insubordinate, he could wait to see where the line of questioning went first.

Trying to spare Visco’s feelings, Omen did not indulge in a self-satisfied smile.

“If I may be candid, sir?” she said.

In what must have been the most iconic gesture of vulcan-hood Omen had ever seen, Spellaun quirked an eyebrow at her request. “Permission granted.”

“It is my _opinion_ that while the medical staff on the station are extremely good at their jobs, I believe they suffer from tunnel vision due to their training,” she said, speaking as quickly as possible in case Visco suddenly objected. “We have access to a massive array of diagnostic equipment —”

“Most of which is unsafe to operate — especially on crew members — you know that, Lieutenant,” Visco interrupted. “Doctor Raddis was just —”

“Being a stubborn idiot as usual,” Omen said. “The metaphasic quasibaryonic scanner does absolutely nothing that can damage organic tissues at low power, even if it is exotic matter lab equipment. I’ve serviced that piece of equipment six times since I’ve come on board and I intimately understand its specifications. I mentioned as much in my disciplinary debrief.”

Spellaun raised a hand and both Omen and Visco paused before launching into further discussion.

“I understand that Lieutenant Omen is well known for unorthodox thinking, it may need not be mentioned but your disciplinary file is extremely colorful, but it’s not what is at issue currently,” he said. “I do not fully understand the results of the scan, but surely you decided it needed to be done for a reason. I assure you that I have no interest in punishing you further if you would enlighten me as to what you saw.”

“I’m sure you noticed that tricorder and medical scanners can’t seem to lock onto whatever is happening inside the bodies of the affected,” Omen said. Hearing someone validate her decision, however baseless it seemed at the time, made her feel the need to rush off into her explanation headlong. Lest someone cut her off. “However, if you’re using your eyes and looking at the progression of the energy disease when it first happens, it clearly follows the nervous system through the body and it has a visual effect very similar to something that everyone on this station sees every time they look out a window.”

Omen gestured grandly to the broad, but shuttered, windows behind Visco’s desk. Currently, the windows acted as displays, showing some idyllic scene form an ocean world — if they had been open, those in the room would have seen a scene awash with the prismatic chaos of the Kersting anomaly and all its accompanying fearful hypnotic effects as energies clashed and spiraled in the throes of violent birth and equally violent deaths.

The vulcan captain nodded — it wasn’t so much an expression as a gradual, almost imperceptible slow dip of his head.

“And after this” — he paused a moment as if suddenly lost in thought — “revelation… You went into your own experience on the station and picked a scanner related to a science laboratory that is used to specifically study the anomaly. It’s a child’s logic that could have been a _post hoc propter hoc_ mistake — but either through experience or luck you still revealed what is our best lead.”

“Sir,” Visco started to say. “I think I —”

Spellaun held up a hand and stopped Visco before he went any further.

“Lieutenant Omen, I would like you to head the medical investigation of this energy-borne disease,” he said. “The nature of the contagion clearly side-steps conventional methods of discovery and so far your unconventional investigation has generated the only lead we have. The next seventy-two hours of this disease will be critical for understanding the danger it poses and how we can avoid further outbreak.

“With Visco’s permission, I would like you to assemble a team from any personnel available on the station and you also have access to the crew and equipment of the _Blackwell._”

“Permission granted,” Visco said without hesitation.

“Station Chief Medical Officer Raddis will continue to oversee the traditional medical investigation, and his own team,” Spellaun added. “I understand that your two teams may clash—if that happens, bring the conflict to me and Commander Lieutenant Visco and we will resolve it.”

“Thank you, sir.” Omen considered launching into a long-winded display of her own thoughts and hypotheses about the disease, which had become myriad in her mind (but there was no way to test them without getting into trouble) but she was stopped by Spellaun’s uncanny lack of expression. Instead, she opted for the easy way out of the conversation.

“I will get directly to work putting together a team.”

This time the captain nodded curtly. “Thank you for your time. I must meditate on the data that Lt. Omen’s work revealed and the new data from the progression of the disease involving the current subjects. Please plan to reconvene at zero seven hundred hours tomorrow. I also suggest both of you get some rest, the bridge between the _Blackwell_ and Acheronwill be complete by that time and research into the problem can begin in earnest.”

“Yes, sir,” Visco and Omen said at almost the same moment.

With that, Spellaun dismissed them and Omen walked away into the waiting white-out of a blizzard, her mind elsewhere as she let herself fall into the recollection of the southern continent of Andor during winter. The imagined chill on her skin sped her thoughts as she breathed crisp, recycled air and mentally went down a list of the people on the station she believed competent enough to join her team.

Unfortunately, that list was short. Also, fortunately, that list was short.

* * *

Somewhere, an alarm was going off. If Lt. Omen had been at her workstation, she would have seen it light up on her console.

Deep within the exceptionally clean underbelly of Acheron station, a region best known as the lower ring — a lesser-visited area that contained mostly maintenance hatches, tubes, panels and the interconnections for various sensor rigs and hookups for recharging stations for autonomous vehicles — a subtle St. Elmo’s fire crept sinuously along dark a corridor.

The fiery glow limned bulkheads and walls as it passed, starting as a swirling line that began to coalesce into pools reminiscent of footprints. The footprints “walked” down the corridor and paused in front of a panel that accessed an isolated EPS conduit that fed a series of sensors that directly interfaced to the lower station’s warp bubble.

Moments later, a structure similar to a human nervous system flashed into being above the flickering footprint pools. It writhed briefly as silhouettes of arms and hands clawed at the conduit and then evaporated.

The same thing happened on two other levels of the maintenance shafts. Similar flickering ghosts, filled with opalescent fire, raked at consoles connected to EPS conduits that fed the sensors that watched the Kersting anomaly tirelessly — and then vanished.

Elsewhere on the station, three more crewmen — engineering maintenance workers who frequented the lower levels of the station during their duty shifts — fell to the deck as they convulsed and arcs of light consumed their bodies.

Medical crews dispatched as they did before, rushing to rescue and quarantine the afflicted.

Also, further up the station, Omen felt the biting chill of Andor deepen in her mind even before the remote, emotionless voice of the computer reported the new medical emergencies.


	5. When the sick are not sickness

Today, Dr. Raddis was angry.

Omen could appreciate his rage — in fact, for andorians the expression and sensation of anger was considered one of the primary emotions all civilized society must be built on.

Unfortunately for Raddis, he lacked any passion.

That lack of passion meant that, for once, Omen didn’t feel ice beneath her feet or frozen wind on her cheeks. To her, the temperature of the air in the quarantine isolation ward, formerly run by Raddis, felt just a little bit warm. The ambient temperature set by life support was designed to be comfortable for humans, but Octevia, acclimated to freezing temperatures on Andor, could have had the dial turned down slightly.

“I don’t understand why you must replace all of my staff,” Raddis huffed. For such a tall man, the doctor looked stout, filling out his blue uniform shirt with wide shoulders and an equally wide face. His mouth, which became a thin line beneath a deeply furrowed brow, almost collapsed upon itself as he clenched his teeth.

“Haven’t you heard?” Omen said, cocking her head slightly. “I don’t work well with others.”

Certainly not so well with Raddis.

All in the span of forty-eight hours, Omen had gone from _persona non grata _on the entire medical deck and now she joyously lorded over kicking him out of his own isolation ward. All thanks to the new vulcan captain and his ship now docked outside the station.

The meeting with Capt. Spellaun at zero seven hundred hours went extremely well. Sleep didn’t come easy to Omen the night before, especially after the briefing previous, and Spellaun was nothing if not extremely efficient and sent along a roster of potential team members to head up the research into the unknown contagion. As operations officer on board the _U.S.S. Remington,_ a deep space science vessel, Omen spent a lot of time poring over personnel rosters when putting together research and away teams for numerous assignments.

Although the crew of the _U.S.S. Blackwell _seemed hugely understaffed, much of the crew had unusually broad training and oftentimes numerous commendations from the Department of Operations Science Division and Starfleet Medical. This actually made it easier for Omen to choose: she wanted people with more general knowledge than expert knowledge. So she selected five specific crew members from the _Blackwell _and filled out the rest of her team from Raddis’s own medical staff.

Excepting Raddis himself, of course. Omen wasn’t going to keep that sour man around except on the periphery. His lack of passion would only distract her when it came down to dealing with whatever exotic aliment was currently running through the station.

Such as he was now. Instead of leaving the quarantine lab, as Omen had hoped he would when he learned that his services were no longer needed, the bulky man decided to hover near the biobeds as engineers were installing more force-field generators.

With the nature of the exotic matter, it would be necessary to upgrade to type seven containment fields — luckily the Iota Labs had extra emitters in storage, which were used to isolate objects taken from the Kersting anomaly while inside the station for study.

The first person that Omen added to her team, Dr. Higgs, stood at Dr. Raddis’s shoulder with a barely restrained smug look on her face. That same look would vanish when Raddis turned his gaze her direction — like a sea anemone closing up at a passing shadow — only to return in full bloom the moment he looked away.

So far, Higgs had remained absolutely silent.

“Is this a good time to discuss something I noticed on the quasibaryonic scans?” she asked Omen. At that, Raddis stiffened and glared at both of them, but instead of speaking up, made up an excuse to leave and walked out of the room. After the quarantine bay doors hissed closed behind him, Higgs continued.

“Certainly events have opened up my schedule,” Higgs said, adjusting her infomatagraphic glasses. Omen could see brief flickers of display data glitter in her eyes and wondered what she could see through the lenses. “That means I’ve been staring at your data all night, without much of a break —” She yawned for effect, then shrugged. “— and your friend from the starship berthed outside the station also granted permission to set up more scanners because we have more casualties.”

“Higgs,” Omen said.

“I know. I’m stalling, the data set that I’m attempting to render is much bigger than I expected and I’m not getting good reception in here. Something about the new quarantine fields is messing with subspace communications.” She paused and made a frustrated motion with her fingers. “Ah. Ah. Ah? There we go.” She twirled a finger in the air in front of Omen. “Please direct your attention to the nearest display.”

With a swipe of her fingers in the air, a holographic display on the wall blanked and then filled with what looked a lot like a transparent view of a humanoid body. Cutaway sections revealed the branches and byways that mapped the nervous system, starting with the spine, the brain stem and peripheral nerves as they approached the fingers and toes.

“This is the most recent scan of Ensign Kanagaki,” Higgs said. “Who you personally know is one of the first people afflicted with this condition. He is currently in a stasis field in the main sickbay isolation ward. He is still in an apparent coma and the effect continues to progress, starting with his neural tissues, spreading to his entire body and has begun to suffuse tissues surrounding nerves. As of zero eight hundred hours today, the ensign’s skin has become nearly transparent and his bones appear to be bombarded with exotic meta-baryonic radiation.”

Another swipe of her fingers and the display began to zoom in on a region of the spine.

“The action of the affliction is difficult to analyze due to the nature of the exotic particle interaction,” Higgs continued, as she spoke she tilted her head slightly as if trying to get a slightly different perspective. “Perhaps this is because of a quantum variance I discovered — almost by accident — that extends from what I think is the initial infection point. In Kanagaki, that’s the brain stem region. The variance here is point-zero-three-nine lower than the variance nearest the peripheral nerves.

“I am not sure if this is the same as the other patients, but the trend appears to follow. I’m afraid that data from the newly infected has not yet been added to the computer, but I expect it’ll reveal the same pattern. This appears spread from the central nervous system first and then begins to ‘eat’ its way into the rest of the body, as I already described.”

While Omen tried to digest the information Higgs had unearthed, the doors to the quarantine bay hissed open and another two crew members walked in stiffly.

The pair who entered looked almost out of place. The first, an extraordinary short woman with streaming white hair and vividly green skin who wore golden engineering uniform. In other light, her face might have been pleasant, an echo of her genetics as an orion (a people from the Rigel system well known for their attractiveness) but currently her expression was one of a person who had just smelled something unpleasant. Her companion towered over her, a broad-shouldered man, with bulging muscles, dark blue tinged skin and steel grey faceted eyes — from a distance it was difficult to tell but Omen knew that instead of pores and hair, his skin would have glistened with saurian scales.

Higgs trailed off as she watched them walk in. “…and I don’t know what to make of that… Um.”

Omen waved them over and all eyes gravitated to the wall screen, which Higgs quickly reset to a diagnostic display. It zoomed out quickly from the body and split into multiple views of the nervous system, along with cutaways that included metadata from the aggregated scans. The different sections of the screen cycled through different visualizations slowly, inviting interaction.

“Lieutenant Rizan, Starfleet Engineering first class,” the small green woman said as she came to a stop at Higgs’s side. “If I may, I’m not quite understanding why I’m part of this…assignment, sir. Will you need an EPS conduit fixed or a relay rerouted? I am not rated for medical equipment.”

Omen suppressed a smile. During her entire speech, Rizan’s expression remained pinched, as if frustrated that she had been torn from an important project and she wished to return to it immediately. Her time in this room, in fact, could have been just another distraction from other things she could be doing.

“I don’t foresee anything as crude as a conduit repair, Lieutenant,” Omen said. “I noticed in your personnel file that you have worked with exotic energy field sensors and equipment and that will come in very handy because I intend to borrow more from the projects around the station as we work on this problem.”

Rizan shrugged at that and huffed softly. “I suppose you’ve got a point. Just don’t expect any miracles.”

Next, the saurian man, who stood a full head taller than Omen smiled. This caused his face to crease from top to bottom and caused his faceted eyes to twinkle in the light.

“Doctor Stomzacho Err reporting for duty.” The saurian’s booming intonation warbled and crackled even across the Universal Translator. “I am not a medical officer, sir, nor a regular crewman but I am on loan to the _Blackwell_ because I was studying wormhole formation during my last tour and needed a ride. When the Captain told me I was requested for this assignment I was not required to comply but I am curious.”

He paused for a moment, looking uncertainly at the medical diagnosis on the screen. Much about the way he shifted his arms and touched his fingers together showed that he was uncomfortable with not understanding what he saw.

“How can I help?”

“We are about to find out,” Omen said. “Let me introduce to you, my friend, Doctor Higgs, medical officer junior grade, who has just gone over the data we have collected from those ‘infected’ by this unknown energy disorder. I have selected both of you from the _Blackwell_ crew roster because you have skills that couple well with hers. The phenomena we’re looking at is not a normal pathogen, nor does it match anything in our databases related to energy entities.”

She glanced at the display on the wall and its myriad of branching lines, each flickering and undulating with yet unexplained energies that still defied medical analysis.

“Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras’?” Omen said. “We are so deep into zebra territory that I’m not sure we’re even hearing hoofbeats, so I’ve chosen all of you based on what the facts are rather than what medical science would have us think.”

During her long-winded speech, Rizan became clearly distracted by something in the room. Her eyes narrowed and her expression pinched even further. “If you’ll excuse me a moment, I think I’m needed right now. Feel free to continue your entertaining conversation until I get back.”

Rizan darted away towards one of the stasis fields being set up by a station engineer, who she immediately began berating in a low, harsh voice. Although an obvious affront to her authority, Omen felt an instant sense of camaraderie with the tiny orion woman: she felt out of place with the briefing, noticed something she could actually do and then went and did it. Furthermore, she took to her task with passion.

Within moments, the engineer technologist had taken a back seat to Rizan, who took his tools and began wrangling other techs in the room to follow instructions.

Omen turned back to the remainder of her team and said, “We’re already way behind the zebra herd. And that means we need options yesterday for dealing with this illness. Even if you’re not from a medical field, everyone here understands the idea of diagnostics be it for people, technology or spatial phenomena. I need diagnosis.”

Raddis, who stood like a grumpy lump by the door all this time, finally threw up his hands, shook his head and left the room. Omen hoped the awkwardness of the situation would leave with him, but she knew the beginning with any new team would be rocky from the start. His looming presence had been a stifling obstruction — not just because he would report what she said back to her commanding officer, but because no doubt he would color everything she did in the worst possible light.

Higgs shifted uncomfortably for a moment and then touched her infogramatic glasses like a talisman before she spoke up.

“Uh,” Higgs started, almost timidly as Omen shifted her gaze to the only person she considered an actual friend on the station. “Ignoring the exotic energy, if I saw this in a patient I was treating, it follows the progression of a neural parasite. Taking back into account the exotic energy, and the quantum variance, we’ve seen beings that act across dimensional barriers before —” She paused, her eyes darting back and forth as she accessed information displayed in her glasses. “—such as the interphasic organisms from Thanatos VII discovered by the crew of the _U.S.S. Enterprise _on stardate 47225.7.”

“It’s a start,” Omen said. “We can rule out interphasic infection using equipment from the Tau Organic Analysis Lab, talk to Doctor Axtin. Higgs, you’re in charge of getting that equipment here as quickly as possible and begin decontamination of one subject as soon as we’re able to move patients into this quarantine environment.”

“Lieutenant, may I interject?” Err said.

Omen nodded. “Please do.”

The large saurian man had moved to the wall during their conversation and had been manipulating one of the later scans of the subjects. The display currently showed waveform analysis related to the peripheral nerves in Ens. Kanagaki’s hands. “I am not as familiar with the Kersting anomaly, but I do know that it is possessed of numerous micro-wormholes — which leads me to believe this is why you chose me for this assignment.”

He paused a moment, Omen stayed silent so he continued. “It is my belief that the energy patterns defy analysis, even with your quasibaryonic scans, because of a form of subspace entanglement that can occur within certain rare exotic-matter related wormholes. We are seeing with this phenomena may not be the actual manifestation. Instead, part of the bodies of the afflicted has been replaced with wormhole matter and the matter itself is being ‘infected’ and is being pulled into a subspace eddy we cannot detect.”

“Very zebra,” Omen said. Only a month ago, she recalled a subspace fracture had caused an issue for Doctor Schrodinger in the Rho Subspace Analysis department. “I want you to check the station directory and contact a catiain listed under the name of Schordinger’s Cat. She’s the assistant of a scientist who studies microwormhole formation and evaporation in the anomaly. Don’t worry, she doesn’t bite.”

“I would be most pleased to meet this…person,” Err said. “Thank you for involving me in your team.”

Omen nodded. “Any other ideas?”

“They’re quantum locked!” Rizan shouted from across the room. Omen looked over to see the small, green woman applying some tool with a glowing tip to an open panel attached to what she figured must have been a field emitter. She had managed to pull the entire room full of techs to her side and everyone was watching her work.

“And?” Omen shouted back.

“Your scanners aren’t getting the full story!” Rizan said, partly muffled because her head was now stuck entirely inside a console. “I could say more if you have some sort of quantum spin scanner… I saw something similar happen to the _U.S.S. Sargasso_ when a polaron collating relay absorbed an antichroniton energy discharge from a Sonoda-class nebula. We couldn’t fix it because the relay was locked to part of the nebula and we had to backtrack our course, line up the ship, and repeat the discharge!”

“I’ll take it!” Omen yelled. “What do you need to determine if that’s going on?”

Rizan popped her head out of the console, set aside her tool and sat up. She said something to the techs that Omen couldn’t hear and the crowd almost instantly scattered to across the room and began attending to their own field emitters. It took Rizan a few moments longer to pick herself up, brush off and walk over.

Omen noticed that the orion’s expression no longer appeared pinched.

“Know anyone with a spare quantum resonance scanner with the ability to provide sub-scale tachyon resolution? It would be needed to provide chroniton buffers to deal with the temporal and quantum effects involved.” She looked very hopeful with the last words as if she were asking for something so specialized that its mere existence would open up unheard-of possibilities.

Omen had no intention of disappointing her.

“Please contact Iban M’Veri at the Sigma Quarantine Lab on deck seven,” she said. The Sigma Labs used extremely specialized temporal stasis fields to isolate artifacts collected from the Kersting anomaly, many of which manifested temporal effects. If anyone had the equipment Rizan would require, they would have it available.

Rizan looked momentarily impressed — but it was a fleeting emotion on her face.

“You all have your assignments,” Omen said. “We have over seven people infected and we need to move quickly. I will make certain you all have your credentials updated so that you can enter the decks you need to visit. The crew of the station is already aware of our situation and that a team is dealing with it.”

She paused a moment to look over the assembled team. To someone else, they might appear to be a ragtag group of personnel, the odds-and-ends of expertise picked for arcane knowledge from a glowing PADD screen — but to Omen they represented the best tool she had for understanding the unknown: people who wouldn’t accept what was right in front of them.

“Report back here in three hours,” she said. “Dismissed.”


	6. Abandon all expertise ye who venture here

The quarantine bay in Starbase Acheron’s sickbay had become eerie quiet with all the staff evacuated. The only sounds came from the hushed movements of holographic tenders — designed to look like nondescript Starfleet Medical human personnel — controlled by Omega who moved between the biobeds and checked on their occupants.

Omen pondered a moment the use of the holograms as one walked near her and nodded as he passed. The hologram looked like a tall, middle-aged man with a balding head wearing a blue medical uniform, he smiled silently while going about his work and his kind eyes rested on Omen a moment before he moved on.

She knew there was no consciousness there — just a simulation effected by photons and transporter beams — perhaps Omega had chosen to cause the simulation to nod, but most likely it was a computerized social response. Since everything in this room was automated by the starbase AI, the holograms served only to carry objects the same way the humanoid staff would. An action which was also ultimately unnecessary, but no doubt comforted the staff as it meant the quarantine bay was never empty of “life.”

Her presence here too was unnecessary, a vulcan might even say detrimental, but andorians were nothing if not sentimental to ritual. She avoided the gaze of another holographic doctor by keeping her head down as she rested a hand against the isolation glass over the biobed that housed Ens. Kanagaki’s body.

He wasn’t the only one in the room, of course, but Omen had chosen to sit near his bed.

Over the past few days, the beds had begun to fill with patients afflicted the same as Kanagaki. The number had continued to rise, now eleven isolation biobeds _hummed_ with automated quarantine stasis fields in a room intended to maintain only eight.

For the first time in what felt like weeks, the cold winds of Andor did not swirl around Omen. She did not find this comforting.

“I’m so sorry, my friend,” she said aloud. Her words felt swallowed up in the silence and the holographic doctors all paused in their rounds as if reverent to her soliloquy. “I don’t know what happened to you. I am suddenly responsible for people again. It’s been six months of fixing malfunctioning equipment and listening to alarms.”

Work on the station felt easy. Her “command,” such as it was, consisted of calling the on-duty maintenance staff and sending them after glitches, ailing equipment, and complaining scientists. This did not always mean that it was _safe_ work, of course, but at least the outcome of an alarm tended to be easily repaired with the tools on hand.

In spite of its perilous stellar geography, Acheron Station tended to be a very boring place.

During her previous tour of duty, aboard the _U.S.S. Remington_, she had overseen an away team visiting a planet being consumed by a type of dark matter ribbon phenomena.

According to computer simulations, the region of the planet should have remained safe for days but that prediction proved wrong. With the lives of her team in danger, Omen convinced the captain to order the tractor beam repulsors routed through the shield emitters to allow the starship to dive into the ribbon and close within kilometers of the team to beam them out.

Everything had gone well enough until the shields began to buckle with only one team member on board.

Captain Skala ordered the vessel out of danger.

An action that would have stranded six personnel on the surface. Knowing he wouldn’t have the resolve to complete the rescue, Omen beamed herself aboard a shuttle and — in a feat that was more luck than ingenuity — used the warp core on board to infuse the shield emitters with dark matter particles.

The shuttle launch delayed the _Remington’s _exit from the dark matter field, severely damaged the nacelles, and blew out most of the EPS grid. Omen rescued two members of her team. The rest perished on the planet and two more crewmen died on board the ship from the resulting damage.

To his credit (and to her deep surprise), Captain Skala did not ask for a court-martial regarding Omen’s actions. Instead, Starfleet saw fit to strip her of rank and transfer her to Operations on Starbase Acheron.

“Out of all the people whose life would depend on me, you were the last I expected,” she said. “I remember you were the first to welcome me to life on the station. And you were right to ask who I rubbed the wrong way to get sent here. I didn’t want to make friends here. This is punishment.”

As personnel went, Kanagaki was good at his job. Even if he took it a little bit more lightheartedly than he should. At least she knew that he would competently deal with the eccentric scientists on the station almost as aptly as he could resolve equipment failures or convince them that they _had_ to follow safety regulations when it came to the operation of that equipment.

“I still don’t understand the problem you have with Lieutenant Moir,” she said. “The two of you should work together well — from what I’ve seen you are each other’s compliment in personality and skill set. Yet I can’t put the two of you together on a project you two fight like a pair of hybor during a frost.”

Omen wondered why Moir suddenly came to mind as she sat there. A reckless thought entered her mind and she realized she’d seen “Elizabeth Moir” in the extremely early hours of the visitor log to this room. The woman didn’t work with anyone else who had fallen ill — only Kanagaki — but surely she couldn’t be visiting him.

“You are still full of surprises,” she said to her silent coworker. After all, he was the “bait” that drew her to the surprise party thrown in honor of her making it six months.

Of course, even Kanagaki knew that she couldn’t transfer off the station. Surely the Starfleet brass who exiled her here would want to keep her here as long as possible while they decided what to do with her. Assuming they had not simply forgotten.

Omen suppressed a sigh and raised her eyes again in an attempt to look at Kanagaki’s face.

The progression of the “disease” had begun to suffuse through his skin making him look ethereal and semitransparent. According to the scanners, the radiation that could not be modeled properly by the computer or sensors continued to eat away at his body, its cells, and atoms. Even now, the edges of his body appeared indistinct, like he was becoming mist.

She looked him over from head to toe. She’d been watching the Kersting anomaly patterns flicker through his skin, highlighting his bones, for long minutes now. She wondered if she was here to comfort him, or herself. The solution to the problem wasn’t going to jump out of his skin — like the “disease” threatened to do — and she couldn’t wish the puzzle would suddenly solve itself.

“Is it too much to ask for someone to tell me what I should do?” she asked nobody in particular.

“Lieutenant,” one of the doctor’s the room spoke aloud. The hologram with the balding head and smile had approached when she had been absorbed in Kanagaki’s condition. “This is Omega speaking. The subjects are ready for transport to the new quarantine facility. I just need your sign off.”

“Can the transporter confinement scanners still get a lock?” she asked.

“Yes,” the hologram said. “Although there is a two percent likelihood they might fail, the probability is increasing every hour. Engineer Rizan has boosted the confinement beam using the quasibaryonic scanner but I believe it has been tuned as far as it will go. We will need to move the subjects as soon as possible.”

Omen nodded. Lieutenant Rizan had proved to be much more valuable than she had anticipated.

“Permission granted,” she said and removed her hand from the glass. “Please begin the beam out sequence and move the patients to the exotic matter quarantine bay.”

The high-pitched buzz of a transporter beam activation resonated through the room and she watched the confinement effect take hold of Kanagaki’s body. It faltered for a moment, flickering uncertainly like a hand attempting to grasp an object with sharp edges, but the computer quickly got it under control and the body vanished into a fading constellation of twinkling lights.

“Wish me luck, my friend. I probably need it,” Omen said.

“You don’t need luck,” the Omega said, speaking through the hologram. “You have us.”

Omen looked into the kind eyes of the holographic doctor for a moment. And during that moment she wondered exactly how sentient Omega could be.

In her heart, she accepted that an artificial intelligence could feel sympathy and show support and she could really use that right now.

“Would that could be enough,” she said. “Time for me to get to work. Please inform Doctor Err that I will be joining him presently at Schrodinger’s Lab in the Deflector Technology section.”

The hologram nodded and promptly vanished from sight — as did all the other holographic doctors in the room. Now, without patients or holograms, the sickbay quarantine room seemed completely empty with the exception of Omen herself.

Moments later the doors hissed closed behind her and the room automatically sealed itself.


	7. Where is Dr. Schrodinger anyway?

Omen joined Err while he was arguing with an expert agent that acted as a kind of receptionist to the entryway. Dr. Schrodinger had something of a “personality” when it came to unannounced visitors, so the agent had a similar disdain for them.

“Why is it so difficult to inform the lab manager that I urgently need his attention?” Err asked.

“Your request in in queue,” the agent said. It had a voice like a teenage girl and spoke in a slightly slow and bored manner that somehow dripped with sarcasm. “You will have to _wait_ your turn.”

“I’m the only one here,” Err chuffed.

Omen decided that it wasn’t necessary to have fun with the saurian but she could poke fun at the MI. “Are you arguing with the computer?” she asked.

“All it doe_ss_ is argue,” Err hissed.

“I am merely following my programming,” the door receptionist said. “You will have to wait.”

“Allow me access under Omen-Alpha-3-3-1-2,” she said and paused a moment. Every MI on the station drew cycles from Omega’s main process, so she knew the main intelligence was listening. “Or I will contact Omega and have you installed in a replicator.”

The door did not even have to think about that for a second. A moment later the light above the doorway changed from a dull red to a soft white and it _shhhhd _open to admit them both into the antechamber that made for the entrance to Dr. Schordinger’s lab complex.

“Please enjoy your time,” the reception program said, cheerily this time.

As the door closed behind them, Omen looked around the room.

For an entryway the room was well-furnished, a split-table sat in the center of the room — the break in the middle of the table allowed for passage across the room and towards a pair of sterile access doors. Surrounding the table, on both sides, were a number of steel-grey chairs; from the wear pattern on the carpet around them, they saw a lot of use. The room had two more doors on the far side, which curved gently inwards as it followed the shape of the station ring. From the markings on those two doors, they led to offices.

“I will be with you in a moment,” a woman’s voice said from a hidden speaker in the ceiling — her voice had a slight growl that was pronounced over her ‘r’s.“The doctor is off station and the staff is currently also on leave for the duration,” she continued. “I am keeping the equipment warm and have received your communique. Please be patient.”

Under normal circumstances, Dr. Schrodinger had proved to be next-to-impossible to contact, which is why Omen had directed Err to contact his assistant. The Cat’s voice on the intercom was instantly recognizable.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever even seen Dr. Schrodinger in the entire six months I’ve been on station,” Omen said.

A holographic display on one of the tables caught her attention. Whoever last did a presentation here forgot to turn it off. Right above the table floated what appeared to be a map of nearby micro-wormhole formation — from the inclination and azimuth, Omen guessed it must be a region very close to the station off the lower maintenance decks by mere kilometers. The cartographic map appeared to show a significant uptick in the formation of these wormholes and they lasted longer than usual but none deposited artifacts, instead there was a lingering radiation field building up.

Omen turned the map with her fingers. The radiation field roughly followed the structure of the low-amplification warp bubble surrounding the station in that region designed to put subspace particle pressure on micro-wormholes in that region. It kept them from forming _within_ the station itself (such a formation could be catastrophic if it happened inside a person or an EPS conduit).

Err made a polite snort behind her to draw Omen’s attention. “We have company,” he said.

The double-doors at the far side of the room _shooshed_ open to admit one average-height caitian covered in white and grey fur. She wore a Starfleet Science uniform with dark blue slashes across her chest — which bore a crisscross shield generator harness. She also wore three belts, each with numerous canisters and containers, and lashed to both legs were more belts with pouches.

When she came in, Cat looked as if she had been overworked and overtired. Her gait seemed stiff and strained as if she had pushed the doors open herself. However, the moment the vibrant blue eyes in her feline face darted to Omen, her entire posture and attitude changed. A smile split her features and she bounded across the carpet.

“Octevia, my friend, it is so good to see you!” In an act that showed outright defiance to Starfleet cultural norms between officers, Cat hugged Omen so tightly she could feel the shield harness press into her ribs. As she did so, body and tail trembled with the strength of the embrace.

Unlike others on the station, Schrodinger’s Cat knew passion and Omen enjoyed her company for it.

Disentangling herself, Omen settled her gaze down on the feline woman — who was really only a few inches shorter than her. At this distance, the wear on her seemed palpably visible — she looked weary, her fur brushed thin in places along her chin, and her mane disheveled. Although her expression remained mobile and her ears perked, Omen could see a weight pressing down on Cat’s posture.

“We’ve got a situation on the station that could really use your help,” Omen said. “I would like to introduce you to Doctor Err. He is a wormhole specialist on loan from the _U.S.S. Blackwell_ and he’s on my auxiliary medical team putting time into attempting to identify the sickness on the station.”

“Of course…I know of this sickness,” Cat said, and the weariness entered her voice, her tail flicked a few times behind her and she looked up at Err, who towered over both Omen and her. “A friend of mine who does engineering maintenance on our section regularly became ill this morning while on duty. It is why I have given leave to the rest of the staff. We thought that these labs would be safe, it is very isolated here and there are crew quarters inside the hot zone, but I felt that keeping them here would be unfair and potentially unsafe.”

Omen nodded. If she ran a lab like this and the people who worked there could have been exposed to unsafe conditions, she too would let them go to their personal quarters, no need to trap them at work.

Cat paused for a moment and then spoke with a low and deliberate tone. “You think that the wormholes are somehow related to what’s happening to people?”

“I am not certain of anything,” Err said. “However, the Lieutenant asked for unconventional avenues of investigation, she called it looking for ‘zebras’, and I suspect there is a contagious exotic matter effect being regulated over subspace. Do you have the equipment needed to test my hypothesis?”

Schrodinger’s Cat lit up at the mention of equipment and wormholes.

“I do!” she exclaimed, turned on her heel, and made as if to dart away towards he double doors that exited the room into the laboratory honeycomb proper. When Omen and Err did not move immediately, Cat stopped fully, turned towards them, and added: “You may follow me.”

Cat led Omen and Err through the doubled-door she had previously entered the room through. It opened into a hallway that seemed to telescope away into the distance — an optical effect Omen had gotten used to on the station. It was caused by the lack of definition between equally spaced doorways and segments of floor in the exotic matter labs. These sections of the inner rings had been built from specialty fabricated bulkheads formed during the expansion of the station from a science and military outpost (when Acheron was an actual “firebase”) and into its current fully scientific mission.

The pendulum swish of Cat’s tail mesmerized Omen briefly she and Err chatted about wormhole theory. Much of the conversation, Omen could not grasp, but listening gave her a moment of clarity as she felt good about her choices for her team.

Cat paused in front of a door, to Omen it appeared almost exactly the same as all the others, except the symbols painted across it differed slightly. A language she didn’t recognize perhaps?

“Rho labs access for Schrodinger’s Cat and guests,” she said.

The door beeped softly and the voice of the receptionist MI said, “Authorization acknowledged for Cat and two guests.” The door opened to reveal an oval space filled with various types of equipment, screens, and black walls studded with holographic projections displaying statistical models. “The room is safe from hazards. You may enter.”

Cat boldly strode into the room and began to move between the various pieces of equipment set on pedestals around the space. As Omen passed, she recognized different configurations of sensor platforms. Stripped bare of the paneling that would normally hide the “guts” of the sensors, many of them reminded her of medical diagrams of the human body but with muscles, veins, and arteries visible.

“Doctor Schrodinger has been working on some _side _projects,” Cat said. “These projects involve improving the equipment that we install within work bee and probe housings. You probably don’t know that most of our subspace analysis equipment can only be mounted in starbases, such as this, or inside of starships because, like most things, detecting _stuff_ in space requires…well extra _space_.”

Cat placed a black-furred hand on a piece of technology that looked like the internals of a Mark VII torpedo casing that had been gutted of its guidance system. Wires seemed to fly everywhere haphazardly through the rounded lattice of its superstructure and handles had been welded onto the sides at 45-degree angles — almost as if it had been intended to be carried like a quantum burst launcher.

“Doctor Err,” Cat said, trilling his name as she did so. “Please describe for me the nature of your scientific emergency and I will find you the platform type you need to help you save my friends.”

Err blinked suddenly at the attention as if caught off guard. “Oh, uh, of course,” he said, and then his gaze became distant. “I believe we are looking at a subspace quantum eddies that are affecting the atoms of the afflicted by pulling them into a separate phasespace or possibly brane. If my suspicions are correct, the subspace eddy will be extremely small, possibly near the Plank length, but its effect is causally dynamic, like the effective radius of a microwormhole.”

Omen put her hands behind her back and watched Cat’s expression rotate between fascination and admiration until her eyes began to scan the room thoughtfully. “What you need is a quantum phase scanner with Plank resolution,” she said.

Err nodded thoughtfully but then raised a claw—

Cat interrupted him. “Except that’s impossible,” she said. “So we need to look for what’s _possible_. Detecting normal microwormhole creation and evaporation is about looking for tachyon emissions, even when the wormhole is invisible the particle spill still gives us the ability to model it. Like looking for a ship using a warp bubble to hide from gravity sensors, it will have a subspace wake.”

“So what we need is a wake detector?” Omen said.

“Yes, that is an apt analogy, I think,” said Err. “Except that we need to look for quanta formulae generated by exotic matter interactions, which means we should be looking for tetryons, specifically the exotic flavored Gamma-tetryon charmlets.”

The last word galvanized Schrodinger’s Cat into instant motion and emotion. Her clawed hand rose from the photon torpedo chassis and she twirled, ballet-like, on the tips of her toes to orient herself towards the furthest back reach of the room.

“I suspect I know _what -- you -- need_,” she said in a voice that deepened with each word, dripping with a sort of knowing gravity.

Omen could feel pride beaming from Cat as she walked purposefully over to an extremely large piece of equipment that appeared to be an amalgam of six Mark XII probe casing superstructures welded together in a hexagon around an empty space approximately a half-meter wide in the center.

Covering every segment of the internal surface of the apparatus, Omen could see thousands of tiny sensor blisters, like a thousand tiny spiders with glittering eyes. Without any sort of paneling, the wires and regulators of the optronics looked like finely spun silk, splashing out along carefully cultivated rows.

“Let me introduce for you the Schrodinger-C’Ruris Effect Detector,” she said with a purr dropping into her vocal fry. “When you absolutely must detect particles crossing the subspace-brane barrier accept nothing else. This girl can give you a nearly Plank accurate accounting of charmlet activity in a two-point three-five-six meter volume with a persistence of approximately six nanochocranes.”

“I am impressed,” Err said, his voice growling slightly in awe. “This is perfect for what I need.”

“She is perfect,” Cat said. “Except, there is one problem.”

“What problem is that?” Omen asked.


	8. Please don’t irradiate the station

“You want to irradiate an afflicted patient with how much tetryon radiation?” Lt. Cmdr. Visco’s face looked as pale as his uniform. “I can’t authorize this. It’s madness — even for you, Lieutenant.”

“There are protocols to deal with tetryon radiation poisoning,” Omen said, “and the entire procedure will be overseen by members of Medical. This is one of our best options right now.”

For his part, Cpt. Spellaun seemed content to watch the two other officers argue this point as he sat silently in his chair, fingertips steepled as if in mediation.

It was an interesting juxtaposition for Omen: ordinarily, Visco would be sitting in a chair and Omen would be standing. He often used this as a way to shorten meetings, forcing other people to stand on their feet while he rested. This time, he and Omen stood, and Spellaun — the newcomer, but superior in this situation — sat at rest and waited to judge the outcome of this argument.

“One of your best options,” Visco said. “You have other options? Why don’t we wait for those.”

“Those options will take more time,” Omen said. “I don’t know how much time we have before the first person dies from whatever this is. We need an answer and that may mean we need to take drastic measures. Now. Because of work done by my team, Kanagaki’s quantum integrity has stabilized at seventy-six percent, but I’m told if it drops below fifty percent we may never be able to bring him back.”

Visco shook his head and the PADD he held clattered onto the desk next to Spellaun. He looked at the captain with a pained expression; his eyes pleading as the rest of his body remained tense.

“I cannot, in my right mind,” he said chewing on his words, “simply authorize using this procedure before other avenues have been explored.”

“The Lieutenant has a case,” Spellaun said. “Although logic dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, she has also outlined a flaw in her own logic for us. The first patient is currently stable and not in danger, our ticking clock has given us time to work on other avenues of discovery.”

Visco breathed out a quick, exhausted sigh. The tension visibly drained from his muscles and color returned to his face. Omen also watched as the vitals readout on the cybernetic bioimplant on his chest subsided to a more regular rhythm. She wondered for a moment if that device ever gave him away when he was trying to hide his emotions — something the man wasn’t good at anyway.

“Can you elaborate on these other options and their path to qualification?” asked Spellaun.

“Of course,” Omen said, grabbing the PADD from the table. “I have Doctor Higgs from Starbase Medical working with Lieutenant Rizan from the _Blackwell_ in installing equipment from the Tau Organic Analysis lab for detecting interphasic organisms. And we are speaking to experts in Sigma Quarantine about slowing the rate of infection in those affected by the energy-disease.”

All of this would have been in her report, of course, but it seemed like a common tactic of Starfleet captains to ask junior officers to repeat themselves unnecessarily. Perhaps he had done this to gauge how well she had the new team handled? Once again, Spellaun’s vulcan stillness worked against her.

The captain shifted almost imperceptibly and his eyes turned to look directly at Omen.

“This matches your report exactly,” he said. “As for the _Blackwell, _I have three medical research teams assigned to the Medical quarantine deck who have already moved equipment from onboard and have begun their own tests. The subjects have been split into three groups under their attention. You will remain in charge overall, but you will coordinate with them regarding patient care. There has been no change in their observations since last we met.”

The last part he added almost in afterthought, another fact piled onto the list of other facts he had just delivered.

“I can check up on Higgs and Rizan right now,” Omen said. “I expect they should have some sort of results within the hour.”

Spellaun nodded. “I will expect a report at your earliest opportunity,” he said. “You are both dismissed.”

Visco led Omen out of the room, leaving Spellaun to himself. The moment they reached the corridor and the door hissed closed behind them, her commanding officer turned towards her and she could feel his eyes on her.

“Yes, sir?” she said trying to keep her voice trim and cordial in that gentle Starfleet accent she’d learned from so many officers. The Academy supposedly prepared new students and officers for the cultural shifting sands of Starfleet politics — something that Omen always felt as if she was slightly outside of — but it never quite prepared her for being put on a station orbiting a black hole with particularly eccentric personnel.

“It was not my intent to override you in front of the Captain,” Visco said. The cardiac patterns displayed on his cybernetic chest piece did not skip a beat, nor did they reveal anything about what sounded like an apology. “I do trust your judgment but I think safer avenues of research would probably be best to start with before we begin blasting people with radiation.”

Lt. Cmdr. Visco had been her commanding officer for her entire six months on Acheron Station. In fact, he was the first face to greet her when she arrived at the station weary and concerned about her future. His calm voice always cut through even the most shrill alarms and she had come to acknowledge his almost fatherly attention to the members of the Operations team.

Omen found she didn’t mind his manner, and the attention that came with it; but sometimes she almost wanted to tell him she already had two fathers, she didn’t really need another.

And yet here he was again lecturing her like a misbehaving child — about _safety_ of all things, which happened to be her current occupation — and somehow he still exuded calm and wisdom.

She gestured away down the hall, her head inclined to look up into his face, and he nodded. It wasn’t uncommon for conversations to happen on the move and she really needed to get down to the Quarantine Bay to check on Rizan and Higgs.

“I have other duties to attend,” Visco said. “But I would like to accompany you part way. I feel as if you have something to say.”

Omen tried her best to keep her emotions off her face during the meeting but perhaps he had detected a hint of frustration? She never was certain of his species, but the man’s thin face, pale freckles, slightly ridged nose and brilliant orange hair revealed his non-human genetics.

Despite her Andorian upbringing, snowy white hair and pale skin, Omen passed as human. As the dominant species in Starfleet, also being human tended to lend her a camaraderie that non-humans didn’t always quite experience, she thought, although she would have felt a lot more at home amidst other andorians — but she was the only person from Andor’s moons on the station. Perhaps, she thought, it was an example of her people’s practical nature in avoiding places that didn’t have much opportunity.

“If I may speak frankly?” she said. The informality of her question would have drawn a reprimand from a less cordial man but at noticing she had deliberately left off the “sir,” Visco only smiled — but the cardiac monitor on his chest did accelerate slightly. Perhaps it was only because of the briskness of their pace?

“Please,” he said.

“I have put together, at a moment’s notice, a team of the best of the best available between Acheron and _Blackwell_ and set them to task. You’re asking me to put one possible route of examination on hold because of a very small amount of risk. I think the Captain is wrong, we should be taking every avenue we have right now because this thing is spreading and people are terrified.”

The off-white panels of the corridor and the sound of the carpet beneath her feet seemed to fade away as Omen fell into herself hoping she could appeal to his paternal nature. If any avenue of discovery mattered all avenues mattered.

A chill went through her veins as she felt the embers of passion rise in her chest. That cold, unyielding flame that meant argument for the sake of arguing. “What if this reveals the illness and gives us the information we need to save them? Now. We have Schrodinger Cat’s equipment now, her expertise, we have the _best _medical personnel in all Starfleet on standby. We should do this! We should do it _now_.”

Omen felt more than heard Visco sigh.

“‘Hothead’ they said when the transfer orders came through,” he muttered. The pace of his footsteps slowed and he fell slightly behind so Omen slowed her pace as well. “The chief of staff here on Acheron told me to turn you down and you know what I said?”

Suddenly, Omen realized they were standing in front of the turbolift doors and she had almost walked past in her furor.

Omen couldn’t look Visco in the eye, she didn’t feel embarrassed so much as she felt she’d just revealed too much about how affected she’d been by even these past seventy-two hours. Unable to look at his face, she opted to look at the biocybernetic implant on his chest.

“You probably gave him your misfits speech,” she said. It wasn’t defeat; it was an acknowledgment that his paternalistic side had heard her passion and understood it but would now ask for patience in the face of pressing need.

“Yes,” Visco said. “Everyone assigned to Acheron since it was decommissioned as a military station is a misfit in one way or another. We’ve all got our reasons why we’re here, that includes me, and I know you don’t think I’m about to give up on anyone. I also know that you’re pretty close with Kanagaki and you watched him collapse a few days ago. His condition is not stable and you’ve been giving the assignment of saving him, along with several other members of our crew.”

“All the more reason I can’t have my hands tied —”

Visco silenced her with a look and Omen shifted on her feet, looking away.

“You are a very good troubleshooter,” he said. “Probably the best I have ever met, Kanagaki is in very good hands. I just want you to know, the moment you exclude all these other causes you have my go ahead with the tetryon generator.”

The buttons on her uniform slid against her skin as the sensation of relief passed through her muscles.

“Thank you, sir,” Omen said and she heard the doors of the turbolift open behind her almost as if it had sensed the end of the conversation.

“Just don’t irradiate my station, okay, Omen,” Visco said as the doors closed.

The last thing Omen saw was the upswing jump of his heartbeat monitor, a bright tracer leaping against the dark screen of his cardiac monitor.

“Of course not,” she said to nobody. “I’m just going to irradiate part of it.”


	9. When at first you don’t succeed

Upon arrival, Omen found Lt. Rizan working on a cylindrical piece of equipment situated directly in the middle of the Medical Quarantine Bay. Dr. Higgs stood nearby, hovering with expectation but her attention wrapped up in something only she could see in her informatagraphic visor.

“I’m still about ten minutes or so away from a diagnostic run, LT,” Rizan said. Various sturdy cases had been set around the base of the equipment for her to stand on so that she could reach into various open panels and make adjustments to the sensitive innards. “Your people here sure keep some exotic equipment laying around—” She rapped on the casing with a tool Omen didn’t recognize. “This emitter assembly has some optronic phase relays that Starfleet Engineering would melt me down for slag to get their hands on.”

“She’s said that several times about the sensor suite,” Higgs said in a conspiratorial hush. “I almost had to separate her and Doctor Axtin’s assistant who got a little possessive of… whatever this is.”

“It’s an interphasic subspace bubble generator with picosecond discriminators.” Rizan’s muffled voice echoed from within the machine as she spoke. Omen leaned over to see the woman’s entire body sticking out of one of the access panels — a spaghetti spray of grey wires with glowing tips dripped out around her as she squirmed in the tight space. “Once I have this baby operating, we will see anything from the Thanatos VII organisms to Devidians. Assuming they’re here.”

Rizan slowly extracted herself from the machine and then carefully slid a bristly component from her hair. She looked at it quizzically for a moment, quirked her shoulders and deposited it into one of the numerous pockets sewn into her uniform.

“Perhaps someone should have a phaser ready just in case?” she said.

“Do you expect any organisms we discover will be hostile?” Omen asked.

“You take one look at what’s going on in those stasis chambers and tell me that’s not hostile,” Rizan said, bobbing her chin towards one of the coffin-shaped biobeds set up mere feet away. “Personally, I’d rather be armed.”

The sentiment reminded Omen instantly of her instructor, Shrihral, who never went anywhere without his sidearm. It seemed odd to her that she would have remembered one of his lessons when this epidemic first started, but she could not summon his image or words of wisdom to her mind at this moment.

Higgs clenched her teeth. “Do we really want to bring a gun into the Medical Bay?” she said.

“That might be a prudent precaution,” Omen said. She tapped her communicator and said, “Omen to Security. Please send two officers immediately to Quarantine Bay Gamma, bring pulse rifles, and an extra phaser.” She glanced at Rizan who frowned and gestured with an open palm. “Make that two extra phasers.”

“When the bubble is active we will be matched to the same phase as multiple different quantum dimensions,” Rizan said. “As it is tuned I will shift the local subspace intersection using the discriminator by degrees. If there’s anything here, we will see it and it will see us. I have to warn you, though, phasers might not even work while the bubble is active.”

“Why did you ask for them then?” Higgs face looked as if it were about to fall off. “I don’t know how to deal with you.”

Omen shook her head. “This isn’t helping,” she said. “Security will be with us and those of us rated with sidearms will be ready. Is there anything else we can do to protect ourselves if we discover interphasic intruders?”

“I have several types of cutoffs that I can employ if we find something hostile and this room will be isolated from local space and local subspace with tachyon-enhanced integrity fields,” Rizan said. “If I disrupt the subspace bubble with an unstable tachyon burst it will collapse, which will once again separate us from whatever we happen to reveal.”

“Or, we’ll end up trapped in here with it,” Higgs said. “You left that part out.”

“Oh yeah,” Rizan said. “We might end up trapped in this room with an angry interphasic parasite with phasers that don’t work.”

“Good to know,” Omen said.

“Once it’s in our phase space, however, we should be able to bludgeon it to death and it will be affected by force fields,” Rizan added. She quirked an eyebrow and twirled two green fingers indicating the four corners of the room. “I can work magic with those field emitters in the event of ‘angry parasite’ so don’t worry your pretty little head. Uh. Sir.”

Visco’s misfits’ speech clearly applied to more crews than just Acheron Station, Omen thought to herself as she looked over the room. The technicians and holographic doctors had already vacated the area in preparation for Rizan’s equipment test leaving only her small team and the fretful bleeping of biobeds.

Presently, the doors to the Quarantine Bay opened and admitted two red uniformed security officers. One woman and one man, both muscled but lithe, Omen recognized them but could not place their names. The woman had a compression pulse rifle slung over her shoulder and she handed Omen two phaser sidearms, one of which she passed to Rizan.

“Thank you,” Omen said. “Stay just within the doorway. We are about to run a test that could reveal hostile aliens. Check your targets before firing, there are patients in those biobeds and the quarantine fields will refract your phaser beams if you hit them. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir,” both said in unison.

Rizan looked down at her phaser and adjusted something on the back interface with her finger. “Set the resonance to synchronize with frequency two-six-four-oh-two,” she said. “That will automatically adjust the beam to match the phase discrimination while the subspace bubble is active.”

Both security officers unslung their phaser rifles and began the adjustments. Omen did the same thing, her fingers remembered the settings with a reflexive certainty as she traversed the menus displayed on the interface. When she was done the phaser chirped an affirmative, followed by a similar sound from every other weapon in the room.

A chilly, prickly flush began to creep over her cheeks when Rizan turned to look at her and nodded. The hairs on her arms stood up and, although she could not see it, she felt her breath fog in the air and a cold wind cut through her uniform. Little white wisps entered her vision as she felt hoary white frost on the tips of her eyelashes.

“You are only as strong as your weakest component,” she heard Shrihral’s voice say. “That goes the same for equipment as it does people. Don’t forget, Octevia, someday that may make the difference between life and death. Now aim and shoot.”

Omen mentally pushed her instructor out of her thoughts.

“Are you set to go, Lieutenant Rizan?” she said out loud. Omen felt her grip on the phaser tighten momentarily, but she kept it lowered. The sensation of bitter cold remained with her, bringing a familiar heat to her fingers as blood flow beneath her skin sped and her heart began to race.

“Higgs,” Rizan said. “Can you monitor the secondary display for me while I tune the discriminators?”

“I can do that,” Higgs said and walked over to the bubble generator.

A second before she seemed transfixed by the presence of the security officers. Omen considered for a moment if it was a good idea to keep her in the room for this test, she had not originally considered the possibility that they would need weapons on hand. Like most Starfleet Medical officers, Higgs didn’t seem very comfortable around sidearms, and working on a station like Acheron, she never had to carry one.

There was no need to distress her, but her expertise would be extremely valuable if something did happen with this test or emergency medical assistance became necessary and they were indeed trapped in this room with alien organisms. Disabled alien organisms, Omen considered hopefully as she felt stirringly cold air enter her lungs.

She could not tell if this meant actual danger or if it was the effect of adrenaline and anticipation but a pervasive chill had settled over the room. She could feel a prickle like Andorian snowflakes landing on the back of her hand as she took stock of the room one more time.

The Quarantine Bay was a large, mostly rectangular room with three exits. One immediately behind her, with the two security guards armed with Type III phaser pulse rifles. The two other exits were smaller doors set near the back corners of the room, reaching them would be difficult, as the scattered biobeds blocked easy egress. All exits would also be sealed with quarantine fields during the test.

Fields of fire in the room were bad, eight quarantine biobeds were arranged in a rough circle around the open center of the room, which was dominated with the subspace bubble equipment. Rizan and Higgs would also be in the middle of the room. They would probably not appreciate being hit by phaser fire.

“I am ready to begin the test, Lieutenant,” Rizan said. “It will take a few minutes for the subspace bubble to reach its full potential and then I will begin flooding the area with baryonic particles to phase shift local subspace.”

She paused a moment and regarded the phaser in her hand, which she attached to her wrist after a moment’s reflection.

“Please proceed,” Omen said. She nodded to the two security personnel standing behind her. “We have you and Higgs covered. I need your attention on the equipment should anything go wrong, but don’t hesitate to kill the process without my say-so if something does.”

For the first time during this entire endeavor, Omen thought she saw uncertainty cross Rizan’s expressive face. The woman glanced at Higgs, whose face was a mask of prepared determination. Higgs nodded and gripped the sides of her console for support.

“I am ramping up the subspace bubble now,” she said. Her fingers struck at the panel in front of her, which quipped in reply — lights began to ignite in succession along the console.

Omen felt a sensation akin to bugs crawling on her skin and she fought the urge to squirm. Other people in the room shifted uncomfortably and behind her, she could hear one of the security guards mutter under his breath. Did it also get colder? It was hard to tell even as the light in the room subtly began to wobble — the chill of the Andorian winter nipping at her skin grew in intensity.

“Deviation detected in the peripheral array,” Higgs said abruptly. “Adjust by five point three two picoseconds spin.”

“That’s a little soon.” Rizan tapped a rapid sequence on her panel and frowned. “That should stabilize it.”

“It’s drifting back into normal,” Higgs said.

That’s when Omen noticed a soft, almost imperceptible whine — like metal spinning against glass. The sound seemed directionless, as if it emanated from everywhere at once, like a ringing in her ears but extremely distant.

“Can anyone else hear that?” The woman security guard said behind her.

“I think it’s a carrier wave being produced by the subspace bubble,” Rizan said. “Nothing to worry about. It should subside once the bubble stabilizes.”

The sound was louder now.

The whine took on an undulating subharmonic like a rapidly pulsing siren, but it was still quieter than distant conversation.

“The bubble is now above fifty percent,” Higgs said. “No other deviations detected. But that sound is really getting on my nerves.”

Omen held still and tried not to listen while she watched. Higgs continued to stare intently at her readouts and Rizan kept updating something on the equipment panels and darted between the generator and a nearby console. As the bubble continued to stabilize she began to move more slowly and spent more time with the console.

“Almost at parity,” Rizan said. “I will begin flooding the area with baryons shortly.”

Now the whine had reached levels so loud that Rizan had to raise her voice above it. Higgs looked extremely uncomfortable at her station, her shoulders slightly hunched upwards.

“The sound isn’t going away, Rizan,” Higgs said. “What’s causing it?”

“I can’t determine the source,” she said. “It could be a side effect of the oscillating subspace field. Still, I think it’s safe to proceed. Lieutenant?”

“We’ve gone this far,” Omen said. “Let’s keep going.”

“Baryonic particle flood beginning now. There will be multiple phase shifts as the discriminators fine-tune themselves.”

The light of the entire room shifted into blue hues and it seemed as if normal light sources suddenly muted. The sensation of bugs on her skin vanished but Omen still felt tense. She could barely see the biobeds now. Higgs and Rizan looked like silhouettes against a dimly lit background, but the movement of their hands and the shift of the heads still remained apparent.

“Scanning phase space now!” Rizan said. “I’m getting very odd readings, but nothing that is associated with the people in the biobeds. What are you seeing, Higgs?”

“I’m getting multiple deviations!” Higgs shouted back. “You should have the telemetry on your side. I can’t describe it! It’s almost like something is pinching the subspace field.”

“What’s happening with that sound—” Omen started to say when she noticed movement in her peripheral vision.

In the part of the room with the fewest biobeds, away from one of the far secondary doors, a thin vertical shimmer appeared in the air. At first, it manifested like a slit mere millimeters wide but then it began to open, beginning near the center, like a rip in a curtain. Red light spilled through, mixing with the blue tinge of the room forming a vibrant purple that hurt the eyes to look at.

The calm Andorian winter biting into Omen’s bones went from a serene cold and she felt the roar of a blizzard upon her. “Now,” she heard her instructor say in a calm voice. “Take aim and fire.”

Except instead of razor-sharp flying shards of ice, all she could see was the blue, half-light surrounding the biobeds in the room and the violet luminescence of the portal in front of her.


	10. Try, try, try again

“That sound!” Higgs said abruptly. “I recognize it! It reminds me of the sound generated by the portals used by nucleogenic life forms encountered by the _U.S.S. Voyager_ in the Delta quadrant. They also attacked via subspace fissures and existed out of phase with normal space.”

“How did the _Voyager_ crew stop them?” Omen yelled as she kept her phaser trained on the rapidly opening portal.

“Phasers worked!”

“Simultaneous fire!” Omen shouted and triggered her sidearm.

Orange beams lanced across the room as Omen and the security personnel all fired at the fissure. Upon striking the subspace interstice, it seemed to wobble a moment — wavering between a deep violet crack in the air and a pattern beyond filled with golden spiderwebs, branching forever in fractal perfect associations, linking, interlocking…falling into each other, over and over into infinity.

“There are more forming!” Higgs yelled.

Omen turned to see three more fissures of the same type breaking open around the room. More phaser beams lashed out as the guards targeted and fired.

Without warning, the sound suddenly stopped and Omen found herself, arm extended, with her phaser pointed at a wall with a dark blast burn. The blue light and shadows had retreated and the lights of the room revealed the ordinary, off-grey walls of the Quarantine Bay.

The space looked as she remembered when she made her initial threat assessment — except for some new phaser damage to the wall panels.

It took a moment for Omen to lower her weapon.

“I shut it down,” Rizan said. Her voice shook as she spoke, but she looked otherwise unaffected.

“What the hell happened?” Omen asked.

“Is everyone alright?” Higgs said.

“No harm,” the woman security officer said.

“Same,” the man said.

Omen clipped her phaser to her belt and touched her hand briefly. As she expected, the event triggered seven different alarms — her office would be a cacophony of distress if she were there. She resolved the alarms with a few key-presses, but most of them had already escalated, which meant that an alert would have been forwarded up the chain of command. A security team and an engineering team would be converging on the medical deck.

“Omen to hazard team,” she said. “Send engineering support to Quarantine Gamma and get whoever you can to check the feeder EPS conduits. Safety gear rated for interphasic hazard.” She tapped her wrist again. “Omen to Lieutenant Commander Visco.”

“Would this call have anything to do with the station-wide alert that just went out?” Visco said over the communicator.

“If you would like to join us in Gamma Bay, sir,” Omen said. “I can update you.”

“Already on my way.”

Omen looked over the room. Her team looked shaken, but not worse for wear. Now that the light-show had ended and adrenaline no longer sang in her veins like an angry blizzard, she could see that Higgs sunk to the floor and held her head in her hands. Rizan knelt next to her and her mouth moved with words Omen could not hear.

The two security officers both spoke into their communicators, probably reporting what happened to superiors for later. One of them, the man, stood near the door and looked as if he intended to cycle it — but before his fingers touched the panel he glanced back at Omen.

“I don’t know if I want to see that happen again,” Rizan said. “We should probably let the hazard teams into the room… I’ll get the quarantine force fields down so that we can open the door.”

“If you believe it’s safe,” Omen said. “We should get medical teams in. Everyone needs to be checked out.”

“I agree,” Higgs said.

She struggled to stand, as if unstable on her feet, Rizan stayed close and held onto her arm. Seeing the two women together, Omen wondered at their potential friendship and was glad she’d chosen the Orion woman for the team. Although her expertise led to this particular “mishap” it had potentially revealed something about the occurrences on the station they had not known until now.

After making sure that Higgs wouldn’t fall over, Rizan turned her attention to her console.

“You can open the door now,” she said.

The double medical bay doors _wooshed_ open to admit a very quiet group of medical personnel who sped into the room with medical kits in tow. They split themselves into pairs and walked directly to each person in the room — including Omen who shook her head. Behind them, Lt. Cmdr. Visco stood framed in the doorway and the look on his face made her think twice about the refusal.

“Fine,” Omen said.

As the officer ran a medical tricorder over her chest and arms in the Starfleet-sanctioned loop-the-loop gesture, Visco went into his questions.

“Can you let me in on what happened in here?” he said. The man’s eyes scanned across the different people in the room, acknowledging Rizan and Higgs, before his head and shoulders turned towards one of the far walls. “That explains the weapons’ fire alarm. But, could someone run me through why you shot at a perfectly good bulkhead?”

“This was a medical test that appears to have given us the next lead on whatever is happening to the station,” Omen said. “We didn’t learn as much as I wanted, though. Sorry about the wall.”

“That doesn’t explain much,” Visco said. “What did you learn?”

“If I may interrupt,” Rizan said. She had left Higgs in the care of the medical staff and walked over.

She held up an oversize PADD, which looked more like she’d simply pried off the console display from a workstation. Omen found herself admiring the woman’s ability to take whatever materials she had on hand and purpose-customize them to whatever she needed.

“We have learned that the Kersting Anomaly — you know, that giant soup of quantum effects right outside the window — is probably _leaking_ into the station even though the subspace bubbles that you use to keep it out,” she said. “I have not had a lot of time to look over the data from the experiment we just completed, but I am thinking that it will reveal exactly that.”

“And the phaser burns on the walls?” asked Visco, ever on-point.

“My fault,” Higgs said. “Subspace breaches began forming partway into the scans and they reminded me of a report I’d read involving the _USS Voyager _and its crew.”

“I see,” Visco said.

The lead medical officer in the room looked up his tricorder. “Everyone checks out, sir. I’d say that they’d gone through a bit of a scare, but there’s nothing to be concerned about right now. Perhaps they should visit the primary medical bay and get a more thorough checkup, but they’re okay for right now. The biobeds in the room also check out. Everything appears to be working properly.”

“Thank you,” Visco said. “You may go back to your duties. Please send in engineering in on your way out.”

As the medical team exited the room, Visco turned back to Omen, with a brief glance at Rizan’s interphasic device, now offline, which still sat silently in the middle of the room.

“I wouldn’t give you permission to use radiation bombardment,” he said. “Yet you somehow still found a way to almost recklessly endanger the station.”

“To be more accurate, sir,” Rizan said. “I think that we could say now that the station is already in danger. If the effects of the anomaly are penetrating to such an extent that we’re able to trigger subspace events inside the bubbles, without our sensors detecting it, then we have a really big problem.”

Visco nodded. He walked slowly over to one of the quarantine biobeds, a figure barely visible beneath the shaded bubble. He sighed and shook his head slowly.

“What is the next step?” he asked.

“I want Rizan to go over the data we collected during the scan,” Omen said. “And, if it’s true that this is infiltration by the Kersting anomaly, then I believe that I can follow up on Engineer Rizan’s idea that the affected patients are quantum locked with something from the anomaly nebula. I believe she needs some equipment from the _Blackwell _to proceed.”

She paused for a moment and waited to see if Rizan had anything to add, the smaller, green woman simply shrugged so Omen continued.

“I also believe this reveals that perhaps the radiation bombardment scan might be a _better idea _now than it was before, sir,” she said. “I understand you feel trepidation that it might endanger the patients, but I believe what we revealed here today is that everyone on this station could be equally affected.”

Visco waved a hand as if trying to stop the idea from escaping. “I don’t think it’s quite that time yet,” he said. “If this is anomaly infiltration and it is subspace related, I think we should start an investigation with the bubble generators.”

“Not a bad idea,” Rizan said. “Which would you rather I worked on, Lieutenant? Upgrading the sensors to detect quantum-entanglement or should I help you look into the subspace cores that protect the station?”

“I think you are better getting that equipment and prepping the sensors,” Omen said. “Doctor Err’s expertise in warp field theory and the team that runs the bubble generators will probably be sufficient to look into that right now.” She paused and looked at Visco. “If you’re okay with that, sir.”

Omen considered that she didn’t feel cold. The danger had passed and even her subconscious did not appear to believe that the discussion described anything immediately hazardous. Perhaps she’d pick up some sort of nutritional supplement at a replicator and drink it while on her way to the Generator Decks.

After what happened in the mess hall, and Kanagaki in one of these quarantine biobeds, she didn’t feel like sitting down around a table there. Not to mention that the station-wide quarantine had basically shut down the place anyway.

“That’s fine,” Visco said. “I can see you’ve got this well in hand. I expect a full report on the outcome of your ‘experiment’ on my desk before oh-seven-hundred tomorrow and, please, don’t shoot up my station any further.”

“Of course, sir,” Omen said. “I will try to keep the shooting to a minimum.”


	11. In strange footsteps we stumble

For once, Omen felt no cold. The blizzard had retreated to wherever it went when the station was calm and all that was left was the carefully regulated air that was based on the body temperature for humans. Which, to her, felt just a few degrees too warm.

After the events in the quarantine bay, Rizan had excused herself and retired to her own quarters. Omen couldn’t bring herself to simply go lay down, so instead, she opened her Operations Incident List and picked a simple job, took the turbolift to the nearest deck, and then walked the rest of the way.

With most of the crew isolated in their quarters because of the outbreak — and her own crew on light duty — the number of issues continued to pile up. Mostly equipment checkups and upstream replacements, but eventually these would grow into bigger problems.

As she checked the bulkhead number above an access panel, Omen also reminded herself that this was also the exact sort of thing that Kanagaki would be working on, if he wasn’t quarantined in a biobed.

The panel came off smoothly with a gentle hiss as the clamps withdrew and she set it aside. Behind, she could see various exposed components. Between a pair of exclusion panels, which covered a conduit bypass on the right and an optronic matrix on the left, she could see a series of four relays. According to the diagnostics on the incident list, one of these relays had been switching data with increased lag, which meant that it would probably fail soon.

Omen pulled open her engineering toolkit and removed a small diagnostic device when her communicator chimed.

“Omen here,” she said.

“You wanted to be informed of any changes regarding the progression of the onboard medical emergency,” Omega said over the comm. “You have not been logged in for over one hour so I decided to use the communicator.”

“Ah, yes, I did,” she said. “Can you summarize or should I log into LCARS?”

Omen placed the diagnostic on the first optronic relay and pressed the button that would start its sequence.

“I can summarize,” Omega said. “In the past three hours, station medical has discovered twelve more people apparently infected with the phenomena. Further decks have been expanded with quarantine. Of the twelve, six were in their quarters. Lieutenant Commander Visco has ordered regular check-ins for all station residents, including sensor sweeps of residences.”

Omen pursed her lips and sighed. This relay showed green. She moved the diagnostic sensor to the next one and began the sequence again.

“What is the current medical protocol for dealing with infected individuals?”

“Quarantine,” Omega said. “There is little else that can be done for them. They are also placed in continuous monitoring that includes exotic matter baryonic sensor detection as per your discovery, but it has not revealed any new data. Everything we know so far is that every new infection follows the same progression as seen in Lieutenant Kanagaki.”

“What’s his condition?”

“Unchanged since you last checked three hours ago,” Omega said. “The incident in Quarantine Bay Gamma has not had any discernible effect.”

The final relay displayed a pass after the diagnostic completed. She tapped her fingers against the green light on the sensor device a few times as if it would change in a moment. After all, one of these relays had to be bad according to the logs.

“That’s odd,” Omen said.

“Do you believe that his condition should have changed given the event that happened in the medical bay?” Omega asked.

Omen shook her head. “No… I’m doing something and I think some diagnostic somewhere must have screwed up, because the relays that I’m looking at should be broken, but they’re not.”

She tapped her foot against the set aside panel and pulled the diagnostic sensor off the relay.

“I think we’re still missing something with this phenomena,” she said. “Something about when Kanagaki went down is bothering me. Has anyone from medical ran regressions regarding the locations that infected individuals were found?”

“Yes,” Omega said. “There is no apparent correlation between onset location and any other sensor data.”

“What if our diagnostics are also bad?” she said. “Just like these relays are fine, but the upstream diagnostics think they’re broken, what if this phenomena has an incubation like an actual contagion? Omega, upload an overlay of the movement of every infected individual in the seventy-two hours before discovery that they were affected by the phenomena to my wrist pad please.”

“Of course,” Omega said. “However, you should know, station medical already retraced the steps of as many subjects as possible in an attempt to determine if any of them came in contact with the same items or hazards. Nothing in common was found.”

“I’m sure they did,” Omen said. “But they don’t have an exotic baryon sensor enhanced tricorder with them. So, would you prepare one for me and direct me to the nearest replimat quarantine zone? I am going to start by tracing Kanagaki’s steps backwards from the mess hall.”

“Replication has started,” Omega said. “The location of the replimat is now on your display. Please let me know if you need anything else. You will have to manually disable the quarantine fields over the mess hall. Most station personnel is asleep or on restricted night shift.”

“I think I can manage,” Omen said. “I’ll just need to call some help.”

Created with Sketch. 

“Does Visco know you want to do this?” Zal asked as he walked up to Omen. The tall cardassian’s muscles bulged beneath his uniform as he began to drop sets of hazard suit armor onto the floor in front of a nearby bulkhead. “Oh yes, and thank you so much for waking me up in the middle of the night for this.”

“You weren’t even asleep, were you.”

Zal dumped yet another full suit on the floor and grinned. Cardassian smiles were something special, Omen thought, they started with too-white teeth surrounded by pale lips and spread to the sides of the face like a predatory animal, but their eyes always stayed friendly. Too friendly. As if all the attention was on you, asking you to forget the teeth, like a man wearing a powered-up plasma rifle slung across his chest with one hand near the trigger and one hand offered as an open hand. Armament and friendship in one gesture.

“What makes you say that?” he said.

Omen picked up a hazard glove and began to inspect it, trying hard to ignore Zal’s teeth.

“Sure,” she said. “You were sitting on your bed, reading the most recent Cardassian mystery novel in the station’s library, but you also have a ticker on the wall display showing the number of known cases in the outbreak. The most recent update happened less than an hour ago, you probably didn’t want to close your eyes, else you’d miss when it goes up again.”

“You know me too well,” Zal grumbled. His smile vanished, replaced by a quizzical smirk. “It went up by three right after Inquisitor Prolmok revealed that the frigate ship captain, Hoge Gel, and her lover, Zovoll, were guilty of conspiracy against Central Command, but we still don’t know what the salvage technician is guilty of. I’m on the edge of my seat.”

The hazard armor affixed easily to each limb as Omen began to don its components. The entire suit used smart fibers to adhere to the surface of the skin or fabric and then would extend a containment field once fully operational. One assembled, and online, the suit would also provide its own oxygen source and isolate her completely from the outside environment.

“Given the Inquisitor’s famous eye for detail,” she said. “I expect that the salvage technician will get caught in a conspiracy with someone you started reading the novel thinking was an ally.”

Zal paused as he pulled a boot up to just beneath his knee and triggered the piece to connect to the pant leg. The smile vanished for a second as his eyes flashed up to meet hers, he almost looked surprised. A moment later the smile returned as he threw his head back and laughed.

“Of course you read Cardassian fiction, Lieutenant,” he said as he reached for another boot. “I have always believed you exhibited a very Cardassian sense of skepticism about our work.”

“I dabble,” Omen said.

“Perhaps that is why you’re committing to an unsanctioned ingress into a quarantined area?” Zal said. “You’re questioning the suppositions of the people around you. Restricting the areas where the events have happened is protocol. It keeps the rest of the crew safe from a potentially spreading pathogen, which is why we’ve only used the station’s computer and its holographic drones to examine the area.”

Omen triggered the collar on the armor and let it cycle through diagnostics. The entire process could take several minutes depending on the last time the suit was worn and how well its last user treated it.

“You will probably get a reprimand for this,” Zal said.

“What do you mean?” she said. “This is a routine maintenance check of the replicator feeds for the mess hall. Check the duty roster, it’s in there, already signed off on. I shouldn’t need permission.”

“Never let it be said that I don’t have a sense of adventure,” Zal said. He looked around at the empty corridor and triggered the diagnostic on his own suit. “It’s just us after all isn’t it? Of course, as we already know, the smaller the conspiracy the harder it is to crack.”

“_You’re not forgetting me are you?_” The comm-link in the hazard suit chirped to life with Higg’s slightly subdued voice. It took some convincing, and cajoling, to get her to wake up and agree to leave her comfortable quarters and station herself in the Operational Safety monitoring room where she could observe everything the station’s sensors could process remotely.

“How long have you been listening?” Zal asked.

“Long enough to know that I don’t possibly get Cardassian novels,” Higgs said. “I’m showing both of you have all green with your suits. I’m going to disable the quarantine lock on the mess hall using my medical override. It won’t set off any alarms. That’s why you woke me up, isn’t it?”

“You know me too well,” Omen said.

She checked her suit’s wrist display. All systems responded to the diagnostic with green indicators, just as Higgs mentioned. The suits battery would allow it to operate under most hazardous conditions at full shielding for approximately twenty minutes, according to the spec sheet, but Omen could push a little bit more out of that with some tweaks in the field if she needed.

“Are you ready for this?” Omen asked Zal.

He responded by showing her his wrist display, green indicators as well.

“Do proceed, Inquisitor, let’s discover what our lovely home in exile is guilty of today,” he said.

Omen nodded. “Higgs—”

“I’m already on it,” her friend said over the comm. A moment later the red light above the mess hall door went out and Omen heard the gentle

The moment her foot crossed the threshold of the mess hall, Omen caught the brisk smell of snowbelles, an Andorian flower that grew in the dead of winter, and she could feel brittle ice crush beneath her feet. Her face felt suddenly flush from the cold that embraced her.

This was the right track, once-again something in this room was _wrong. _Omen focused on the feeling and again found a memory of her old instructor, Shrihral , waiting for her.

This particular time he stood over her after a particularly well-aimed compression phaser blast had knocked her down and winded her. She recalled his gaze pinned her to the floor, his face like thunder, as he spoke. He had his phaser rifle in one hand and his helmet in the other. Shrihral’s snowy hair enveloped his blue face like a blizzard burst and his antenna quivered as he shook his head.

“You cannot enter an empty room like running into a field!” His voice rained down on her like hailstones.

The butt of his rifle struck her in the middle of her chest armor, knocking the wind out of Omen. She coughed against the pressure, her chestplate had dissipated most of the phaser blast, but she still felt sore where she took the hit.

“Because you let your blood choose the path, you thought you could depend on only your feet through the door, little soldier,” he said. “You saw me, but not the drone that shot you. When hunting, speed is not the essence, you need to anticipate your prey. Challenge your assumptions, the obvious is dangerous because it distracts you from the hidden. Next time use your eyes and equipment first, only then let your feet follow.”

Zal tapped at his tricorder behind her, which whirred with lilting beeps. “Is everything alright?” he asked. “You’re not moving.”

“It’s alright,” Omen said. She tapped at her wrist to activate a visual overlay with her exotic baryon sensor and shared it with Zal’s suit. “Something just reminded me of some old instruction I received about empty rooms.”


	12. The anomaly underneath the skin

Slowly this time, Omen stepped into the room, watching through augmented vision.

For the most part, the room seemed completely serene. After Kanagaki had been “infected,” the evacuation and seal of the room happened quickly. The automatic cleaning systems never even triggered to upright fallen chairs or move tables back from their positions after being pushed aside by rescue crews.

“I’m not picking up anything out of the ordinary,” Zal said. His tricorder beeped in agreement as he waved it around the room and frowned at the readout. “So far the readings match the records of the medical crew and the computer scans since we were last in this room.”

“Stay behind me and walk in my footsteps,” Omen said. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“You have the lead, Lieutenant,” Zal said.

In her augmented vision, Omen could see approximately where everyone had been standing when Kanagaki fell. She also called up a guidepath that would display the route he took before entering the room and she saw the path lead to the back of the room, through the maintenance doors, and into the back-end corridors beyond.

“I thought the alarm on that seal was spoofed,” Omen said. “I looked at the records on my way here and Kanagaki had actually gone to work on it a second time?”

“Come to think of it,” Zal said. “He did come out of that maintenance hatch right before we all gathered for your party. I thought that was strange, although he was officially off duty so that you would think he was unavailable. He didn’t need to go back there again.”

“According to the logs, he’d been back there for various reasons six times in the past five days,” Omen said. “Yet, I’m only seeing two incident reports — aside from the spoofed alarm — which, if included, would only make three. Is that the thing that’s being hidden by the obvious?”

“I don’t understand,” Zal said.

“Higgs,” Omen said. “While we scan this room, could you do another cross check for me and compare the maintenance logs against the movement patterns of everyone who has so-far been infected. Flag anyone who has visited the same spot multiple times that would not be a common activity.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Higgs said over the comm-link.

“Meanwhile, follow me.” Omen said. “I’m going in.”

Cautiously, and carefully, Omen picked her way through the room with her tricorder leading the way. She carefully avoided the place where Kanagaki stood when the phenomena first manifested itself, but even the baryonic scan showed nothing there. Perhaps she needed something that could emit the phased warp bubbles generated by Rizan’s equipment to see the aftereffects.

Or, perhaps not.

“What’s this?” Omen said upon reaching the maintenance hatch.

The hatch was made out of the same duratanium alloy as the rest of the wall, a grey plated material painted over with nanocomposites designed to remain unreactive in the CO2 scrubbed atmosphere of the station that could conduct the energies needed to extend structural integrity fields. This part of the station was constructed from pieces of one of the first starships to enter the Kersting anomaly and these walls would be the same material as the outer hull.

Yet, somehow, something had warped the material of the hatch subtly. Omen could see bright silver metal sheared with what looked like striations at the point where the two sides of the hatch should have met in a perfect seal.

“Lieutenant,” Zal said. “Check your tricorder, I’m detecting increase exotic quasibaryonic activity beyond this door. But, something’s not right, my readings don’t agree with station telemetry. The station’s sensors say nothing is there.”

Omen glanced down at her tricorder — the quasibaryonic sensor enhancement revealed a region of increased activity thirty meters beyond the door, possibly within the honeycomb of back-end access junctions that fed the Iota Exotic Matter labs segments. She switched her augmented vision to transparentize the bulkhead using a subroutine given to her by Higgs and she could see that indeed, the region appeared near the to-vacuum bulkheads in the region where the Iota lab’s exhaust portals would be accessed.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing, Higgs?” Omen asked.

“Yes,” her friend replied. “The readings from your tricorders are coming in loud and clear. But, Zal’s right, the station sensors don’t seem to see anything in that corridor at all. I’m getting normal readings all the way to the other end of Iota. What do you think is going on?”

“It means something’s interfering with the sensors,” Omen said. “I’ve already run into something similar earlier today when I was fixing a relay junction. Can you get an emergency transporter lock on us? I’m going in.”

“Emergency transporter lock is stable,” Higgs said. “Good luck.”

Omen nodded and pressed the lock on the maintenance hatch. The panel buzzed and clicked, then rejected her access. The error code displayed on the screen suggested the problem was mechanical in nature.

“I think it’s stuck,” Zal said.

“Can you tell what warped the hatch?” Omen asked. “This this is three inches of duratanium alloy armor from a starship designed to break through the anomaly itself. Nothing but extreme forces should be able to do this and it shouldn’t be happening without _something_ noticing.”

“I can’t help you there,” Zal said. “Perhaps this is why Kanagaki came back to this spot repeatedly? If it were warping slowly, maintenance issues would start piling up.”

Except that Higgs had already confirmed to Omen that issues had not been piling up.

“Okay,” Omen said. “I have an idea. Stand clear from the hatch.”

She holstered her tricorder before she turned up the hazard armor’s tensile strength and its integrity field with her wrist controls before upending a nearby narrow table. This one was less of a table for eating on and more of a decorative bench designed to hold trophies — which clattered to the floor. The tables in this room would have been replicated, but she knew the Iota Lab’s folks had a taste for extremely durable materials, so chances were good that the tabletops would be made of something sturdy.

The tabletop read as diamond composite in her augmented vision. “This will work,” she said. Omen gripped it as tightly as possible and slammed it into the breach formed by the warped seal and twisted with as much torque as she could manage. Zal, who had been slow to move away from the hatch, yelped and jumped back as the table clanged and scraped against the duratanium alloy and the entire wall shuddered. Omen paused for a moment — the hatch access panel flickered for a moment — and then struck it again, harder this time.

A loud, grinding crack issued from the hatch, the panel chimed and the error code changed, then the two leaves folded outwards to reveal a narrow, but tall access corridor that followed the curvature of the station into the distance. Omen wasn’t sure what she expected to see, but nothing moved and her augmented vision only displayed that Kanagaki’s path entered and then abruptly turned left twenty meters in.

“What was that about?” Zal said.

“Percussive maintenance,” Omen said. “Remember how you mentioned Kanagaki hit the other seal with a hyperspanner to fix it?”

“I— I was kidding,” he said as he looked into the access tube. “However, I can’t argue with results, now can I?”

“Higgs, we are proceeding into the access chambers,” Omen said.

“I read you,” Higgs replied. “The computer is still working on the data you requested. Something’s really slowing down computational power right now. This should have been done minutes ago.”

Again following the warning from her instructor, Omen swept the inside of the corridor with her tricorder before stepping in. She still felt cold, but the ice had retreated. She turned to look at Zal. His predatory smile had vanished, replaced with thin grey pursed lips and wary agitation in his eyes.

“After you,” he said.

Omen nodded and began to slowly walk down the corridor. She reminded herself not to touch the sides, not sure why that thought had entered her mind. Whatever had warped the hatch could have affected the structural integrity of the walls, the floor, or the ceiling. Having lived in space for so long, she had learned that she took the stability of the ground for granted — another lesson she had neglected from her time on Andoria, where sometimes every step on the icy ground could be dangerous.

“Distance?” she asked.

“Turn left in eight meters,” Zal said.

That followed the path that Kanagaki had taken to reach the security seal. There would be at least two other seals before they would reach that one. Omen couldn’t quite recall the corridor diagram, but most of Iota Labs looked the same. The region was a hive of labs built with a radiating symmetry so that each lab section could receive hookups for computer access, atmosphere, EPS conduits, and exotic matter transport.

Each lab also had seven meters of dead space between them on the flank and outer sides for specialized equipment, which meant that sequential lab structures were canted alternately up and down with respect to the personnel corridor. The specifications showed that even labs were canted up and odd labs canted down.

The first seal that Kanagaki passed through on the way to the anomaly did not resist attempts to enter and had no warping. It opened without complaint when Omen triggered the panel.

“Less than fifteen meters,” Zal said.

“I’m still showing nothing on the station’s sensors,” Higgs said. “However, I’m getting some interference with the training beam for the emergency transporters. Please be careful.”

“Acknowledged,” Omen said.

Quasibaryonic particle detection began to ramp up slightly in the access corridor as the floor began to descend and the walls broadened to open into an equipment chamber. She began to feel the gentle patter of cold touch her face and her hands and the floor seemed to descend into what appeared to be a bitter cold fog. Freezing fog wasn’t an uncommon occurrence on Andoria, it would rise up out of snow vales, or drift down from mountains without warning. However, on a station such as Acheron, it was totally out of place.

“The environmental controls must be malfunctioning,” Zal said.

Omen caught herself before surprise caused her to ask how Zal could see her memory of Androian fog. Instead, she flipped on a light and watched it cut down the corridor, lighting up the mist as it went. This was not a hallucination, the access chamber beyond was filled with some sort of gas.

“Composition?” Omen asked.

“I’m not getting any reading from it,” Zal said. “The tricorder says it’s not there. That’s very strange, isn’t it?”

Zal stepped around her into the access chamber and moved toward the forward tendrils of the fog and began to reach for it. The ground fog at first seemed to shift in unseen currents, dissolved into eddies at his approach, it curled up around itself and began to roll towards him.

“Stop! Zal! Move back!” Omen shouted and grabbed his wrist. As she yanked him away, the fog appeared to crash into an invisible wall and folded back onto itself. A ripple undulated over the entire mass before it settled back into it serene shifts again.

“Let’s not engage with this until we can determine what it is,” she said.

“Understood,” Zal said. “But, how do you suggest we study this if we can’t take a sample or interact with it?”

“One step at a time,” Omen said and pointed her tricorder further down the junction. “Because I’d like to know a lot more about _that_.”


	13. Consider the poison as medicine

“I don’t see anything,” Higgs said over the comm. The sound of her voice harsh in the sudden stillness — Zal and Omen almost dared not breathe.

Omen shifted very slightly to a better gauge on the size and distance of what her mind was now telling her must be an “anomaly.”

And that was the only way she could accurately describe what her eyes saw — as her tricorder and augmented sight in the hazard suit showed absolutely nothing. The only sensor with any sort of resolution or telemetry was the quasibaryonic detector she’d cobbled together and that did nothing but display shifting shadows and static.

Up ahead, shrouded in the sensor-invisible fog, the access corridor had expanded slightly on both sides and the floor’s incline steepened. Somehow the fog managed to cling to the sloping floor without any effort, idly drifting along as it clawed at the walls, breaking up only when it encountered open wall panels or the glitter of light from an exposed piece of machinery or internal component.

Omen recognized the room that housed the “anomaly” as one of the many junctions along the outside of the station’s hull designed to act as a buffer space for the different starship modules. These spaces also acted as confluence points for EPS conduits and the various physical communication cables that crisscrossed the station, separate redundancies that kept the whole place from falling into chaos.

Standing approximately two meter’s tall, Omen and Zal witnessed what looked somewhat like a glowing humanoid figure — a figure described only by light-limned tracers that appeared to follow a map of a human nervous system. Assuming she wasn’t suffering some extreme form of pareidolia, the figure appeared to be accessing one of the currently exposed panels.

The being, if it could be described as such, looked like a tight tangle of multicolored glowing skeins that barely existed. It didn’t flicker so much as interrupt itself as it moved. Light coruscated across the lines of light, coalescing and reflecting off one another, but it cast very little light of its own. Some of the more subtle patterns that danced along those threads of light reminded Omen of the Kersting Anomaly outside — a revelation that she was still not accustomed to.

“Isn’t that the control circuit for the safety hatch?” Zal asked. His voice seemed very quiet and very distant. In his hazard suit, of course, he could have shouted at the top of his lungs and no sound could be heard, so he didn’t have to keep his voice low, but Omen understood the instinct.

“I’m not sure what we’re looking at,” Omen said. “Higgs?”

“Nothing here, boss,” her friend said. “Can you let me into the feed from your suits?”

Omen nodded to Zal when she saw him raise an eyebrow. Both of them carefully moved their hands and tapped wrist controls. She almost felt like kicking herself for not sharing the video in the first place.

As they did this, the figure continued to move. Its motions appeared lifelike even as it twisted and changed shape, which blurred and tangled the twisted rivers of light that simulated a humanoid nervous system. As it worked, it seemed to pause, press buttons, reach down, kneel, and stand.

Omen recognized many of the motions as similar to those she might commit to when addressing a problem in an exposed hatch with circuitry and other equipment.

“Anyone have an idea of what we’re looking at?” she said. “If I were to guess, this looks like an echo of someone repairing whatever is behind that panel.”

“Let me figure out what that panel accesses,” Higgs said.

“It looks a lot like a person,” Omen said. “Not to just to any conclusions, but if this is related to the epidemic… Higgs, could you give me an idea of the height and weight this ‘person’ might be?”

“Sure,” Higgs said. “With access to video from both of you. The computer says approximately five three and potentially one hundred and sixty pounds.”

“Surely you don’t think—” Zal started to say and then stopped himself when Omen turned to look at him.

“Higgs,” she said. “Could you compare that to the Operational Safety roster?”

“I… I see what you’re getting at, and, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking… That matches Ensign Kanagaki. It also matches potentially thirty-seven other people.”

“I expect that none of them have been in this access corridor recently?”

“Not a one. Only Kanagaki.”

“We need to report this to Visco and Captain Spellaun,” said Zal.

Omen began to reply when she felt the sudden tinge of cold on her skin. Like a shock of thunder from an empty sky, the sensation of bone-deep chill crashed around her—

—the figure turned its “head,” which could be seen as an asymmetrical glow of twirling veins of multicolored light with two darker spots that seemed congruent with humanoid eyes. The features of the entity lacked anything so easy as a “skull” or a “face” to give her any idea that he could be facing her, but she could still feel its gaze.

“Lieutenant?” Zal said abruptly.

“I see it,” she said.

The figure had stopped moving. With the total lack of motion, the flickering and half-reality of its features resolved into clarity. Unmoving, its features looked like an extremely realistic, but holographic false-color display of human anatomy. Omen could make out such major branching nerves as the radial and ulnar nerves splitting away from the spinal cord, flowing down the “arms” and then feathering out into a kaleidoscopic filigree that hazily described the “hands.”

Omen turned her flashlight on and pointed it directly at the entity. It did not react — at least not initially.

“I’m still not getting much of a change from the tricorder,” Omen said carefully. “Higgs, are you getting anything on station sensors?”

“Still invisible,” she said.

That’s when the figure began to move toward them. The moments before could have been indecision, a sort of puzzled guesswork by a monkey brain, but now it had come to a conclusion and that meant action. It didn’t come towards them with any speed, or grace, but instead the timid approach of curiosity.

Zal reacted immediately by backing up and Omen followed course. It seemed only prudent to back away.

As it approached, though, further features began to come into view. In motion, the entity lost much of its previous resolution, instead, the different nervous skeins bled into one another, but it also gave more context to the spaces where the nerve bundles weren’t. Although the head area, which contained the most light patterns, lost clarity entirely, and even the dark “eyes” before seemed to disappear.

“It’s coming towards us,” Omen said.

It walked three steps before coming to a pause and raised a “hand” towards Omen and Zal as they continued to retreat.

“Are you two okay?” Higgs asked.

“It seems to have stopped and now it’s gesturing,” Omen said. “I can’t really tell if it’s aware of us or what’s going on here.”

Omen turned slightly towards Zal and lifted her tricorder towards him.

“Take this and keep it scanning,” she said. “I’ve got an idea… Higgs, do you have emergency transporter locks on both of us?”

“Why do I hate it when you ask me things like that?” Higgs said. “Yes. I do.”

“Lieutenant, I must strongly advise against this,” Zal said.

“That’s just your overdeveloped Cardassian sense of self-preservation talking,” Omen said. “Don’t’ worry, if this goes as I expect, you’re still going to have to tell me the ending of that holonovel. I want to know what the freighter captain is guilty of.”

Zal took the tricorder from her hand and tapped at the screen with a careful jab.

“I’ve got your back,” he said. “Don’t worry, Higgs, if anything goes wrong I’ll pull her out personally.”

Omen could hear Higgs biting her lip even over the comm. “Transporter lock is live and holding,” she said.

“I am moving now,” Omen said.

The sensation of the blizzard continued to rage around her as Omen walked slowly towards the wall of mist that separated the section of corridor with her and Zal and the room with the anomalous “person.”

“What are you feeling?” Zal asked.

“I’m cold,” Omen said. She didn’t think that Zal would understand any other sensations she could feel — the freezing shock of adrenaline and teptaline raging around her like a snowstorm, focusing her senses. “The interior fog is still one-tenth of a meter away. I am coming into contact with it now.”

As her gloved hand intersected the fog, it curled away from her like a living thing. As she moved her hand side to side, it retreated just enough to keep a bubble of space between her and it. As she advanced, it receded.

“I’m not feeling anything,” she said. “The suit is showing nothing either. I’m going to continue.”

One foot over the line. Both feet over the line into the fog. It continued to retreat from her; but the anomalous figure continued to stand, passive and compliant as if waiting.

Omen walked a few more steps, now she could be entirely within the fog. It flowed in behind her but kept a bubble around her feet and arms.

“I am now approximately three meters away from the anomaly,” Omen said. “It hasn’t moved since it initially walked towards us. Zal?”

“Readings are the same as before,” he said. “I’m getting a little more interesting information about the quasibaryonic distribution in the room, though. I think that Omega has gotten better pattern recognition. For example, I think I can get some resolution on the anomaly.”

The figure gestured again. This time with both hands outstretched with palms out as if offering or requesting help. Then it waved one hand and placed the other against its face. Omen found it difficult to follow the range of gestures because of the nature of the anomaly and its indistinct edges.

“I am not sure if it can see me,” Omen said. “It seems to have reacted to my approach. I’m going to keep moving.”

As she walked towards it slowly, the figure let its “arms” fall to its sides and it seemed to wait for her approach. When she was less than a meter away the figure raised both hands in a warding gesture and took a half-step back.

In response, Omen stopped her approach.

“Do you think there’s some sort of communication here?” she said. “I’m not sure if this is a response to my proximity or something else is going on.”

The figure let its hands drop to its sides and then raised one again, reaching forward as if to offer a handshake.

“Omen…” Higgs began to say.

Omen took another step forward and reached back—

“Something’s happening outside the station near your hull section!” Higgs said. “I have several warnings that the anomaly is shifting to a higher energy state in that region. The subspace generator grid is spinning up. I’m not sure if—”

Omen could feel ice breaking beneath her feet as she edged closer towards the figure’s outstretched hand. Less a hand than a diaphanous network of energy threads that appeared to flicker in and out of existence as it moved. An alarm went off in her hazard suit moments before contact.

“Lieutenant!” Zal shouted from behind her. Her attention too focused on the figure, she couldn’t see him, but she could feel a sudden jolt as he grabbed onto the back of her suit. “There’s a massive tachyon surge. We need to get out of here before one of these exposed EPS conduits reacts badly.”

Tiny filaments of St. Elmo’s fire began to rise from every surface in the room and Omen could hear the soft whine of power conduits surging with ambiplasma. She could feel it resonate even within her hazard suit, gaining substance and power.

“Kanagaki is that you?” Omen asked, pushing herself forward against what felt like an icy wind of hurricane force. The twisted glowing paths of neurogenic light separated in her vision, breaking apart into fractal patterns that fell away into a void of endless infinite repetition. Neuron over particle tumbling in her vision swimming like the blizzard of snow she felt stinging her skin.

Somewhere — somewhere distant — she could hear Zal’s voice calling her name.

“Tachyon levels rising!” Higgs yelled over the comms, cutting off something Zal was shouting. “I’ve got tetryon radiation and quasibaryonic sources are going off the charts. I’m getting you out of there! Hang on. Lock engaged—”

More alarms triggered — adding to a discordant wail inside her helmet — and the sound of Higg’s voice was drowned out by the static roar of a transporter lock.

Omen could vaguely feel hands grab ahold as she roughly crashed to the floor of a brightly lit room. Comms must have been offline because all she could hear was muffled voices grumbling — at least one of them distinctly Cardassian. She choked and tried to get the helmet off, but someone else did it for her, the latches sprang free and the noise level somehow got louder.

“Lieutenant, can you hear me? What is your physical condition?” The sound of that voice gave her some anchorage in reality again, the deep, sonorous baritone of carefully modulated words, meticulously chosen with Vulcan precision.

“Captain,” she said, trying not to sputter her words. “I am sorry to have bothered you.”

“Worry about that later,” another voice said — Cmdr. Visco. “Right now we need to know as much as you can tell us about what you and Zal encountered on your unauthorized outing into quarantine.”


	14. Touching madness without gloves

Omen felt warm. A memory of biting cold lingered on the edges of her consciousness as she slowly became aware of her surroundings. First, she felt the soft blankets constricting her body, which she tried to shove away initially but stopped when suddenly her skin touched cool unyielding stone.

Stone?

Omen’s eyes flashed open.

She could smell the gentle scent of burning wood and the sensation of warmth peeled across her hands and face as she turned towards a source of light.

A fire flickered inside a fireplace hewn from a dark, crystalline rock. Slabs of rock rose on both sides of the hearth that contained the blaze and allowed the exhaust to flow up a hidden flume — at the same time, the stone reflected the heat in gentle waves that caressed her skin.

Turning again, Omen looked up at the ceiling. The flickering glow of the fire cast bending shadows on the plasteel roof that curved away from her to reveal a very large room. The crackling sound of the blaze echoed through the compartment as she shook away sleep and she began to notice the soft sound of conversation — two voices — and the smell of something that reminded her of home.

“You had quite a spill out there,” Shrihral’s voice percolated through Omen’s barely awake thoughts like gentle fingers running through hair. The moment he spoke, the other voice in the conversation went silent, but Omen could still sense the other person in the room. Whomever it was, paused to put a cup down on a plate that rattled on a wooden table.

Omen licked her lips and tried to sit up. A motion that her body immediately punished. For a moment, it felt as if every muscle lit on fire, she could feel nerves in her feet and hands scream and she fought back a wince and let herself relax again.

She swept her eyes to the other side of the space. She’d awoken inside of a gathering hall, perhaps connected to someone’s house. The floor between her and Shrihral was strewn with large tapestry rugs that depicted icy landscapes and hunters traveling across them hunting the large megafauna of Andoria. On the walls, she could see various tools and implements used for traveling over ice hung amid old weapons, such as ushaan-tor picks, and bigger long-hafted spears for bringing down large game.

It took a moment for Omen’s eyes to focus on Shrihral’s guest. A blue-skinned woman who sat primly across the table from him. Just as Omen had thought, she had placed a teacup on the table moments before — steam still rose out of the cup that grasped at the features of her face. And Omen knew those features well, the narrow triangle of her nose above slightly parted oval lips. Her mother had an expression that mixed both concern and relief into a portrait of care and restraint.

Asymaa Zh’rhyrran of the Andorian House Crescendo had not been initially keen to see her only human daughter head off by herself to take part in the coming of age ceremonies of her people. It had been months before that Omen had announced her intention to join the Andorian defense forces and thus gain rank and honor for her family — there were no objections, of course — but she knew even with her father’s proud words that her mother questioned the wisdom of such a fragile child seeking glory through the military.

“Mother,” Omen said quietly. “You need not have come.”

“Nonsense, my _zhei_.” Asymaa’s voice cut through the next objection that came to Omen’s mind with a forceful certainty. “I was on my way already — accidents notwithstanding — and I still expect my daughter to present herself. There’s no need to feel embarrassed. You don’t look so bad for someone who had a mountain fall on them.”

Omen could barely recall exactly what happened, all she remembered was the sudden rush of white when the ground disappeared from beneath her and the shouts of her classmates and instructor. They had been two days into team survival training and she could still feel the burden of her gear bearing down. Her hands still hurt from clenching hard on the straps of her harness — something drilled into the students should they find themselves falling.

Willing herself to move, Omen pulled her hand close and saw that the straps had bitten deep red and black bruises into the palm of her hands.

“The antigrav in your backpack probably saved you from the worst of it,” Shrihral said. His voice was gentle, almost casual. Omen wasn’t used to him speaking so carefully and so frankly. Perhaps it was her mother’s presence tempering his words. “Even with those precautions, the acceleration probably bruised you something fierce. You should take it easy.”

Part of the event returned to her as she sat up a little, wincing as she did. The mountains had been extraordinarily cold for summertime on Andoria’s northern shelf, but it was a perfect time to do team scouting missions. Her clutch had been linked together with tethers so that they wouldn’t lose track of one another in one of the famous blizzards that could rush across the landscape without warning. It also meant that should anyone fall, the rest could catch them.

A knot stuck in Omen’s throat and — against her own best judgment — she sat bolt upright.

“What about everyone else? Are they okay?”

Shrihral made a calming gesture with his dark blue hands. “Nevermind that, child,” he said. “Everyone else is fine. We beamed them off the mountainside after you fell through the drift-snow.”

Omen rubbed her forehead. “Obil’s link froze,” she said. “I had to get to him so that I could hook him up again. And I think I slipped.”

“You’re probably feeling the effects of extreme cold,” her mother said. “Your half-human heritage means that you’re extremely fragile. Stay there a moment, I’ll bring you something to warm you up.”

Asymaa rose as quietly as a cloud and floated out of the room. The light in the room changed subtly as she opened a hidden door and the scent Omen had detected earlier, some sort of meaty stew, filled with space with an aroma that made her mouth water.

With her mother’s exit, Shrihral’s expression changed and she once again recognized the craggy severity of her instructor’s features. His antenna turned inward as he rose from his chair and he walked towards her. She could see a stern emotion pass over his face as he put his hot hands on her bare shoulders but when he spoke, his words conveyed only calm.

“I’ve been trying to teach you to be more aware of your surroundings and of yourself,” he said. “You fell today because you disregarded your training and my advice.” Omen’s lips parted but no words came out and Shrihral shook his head. “Everyone in your cohort can handle themselves and Obil fixed his link moments after you slipped and fell. You were the only one to crash through the snow. Please stop trying to do everything for everyone; you are part of a team and that’s another lesson you have to learn.”

The strong aroma of soup mixed with spicy perfume accompanied a shadow that crossed the room behind Shrihral.

“Heed me now, student,” he said. “You can’t save everyone, especially if you don’t mind yourself. In your future, there will be losses — see to it that you don’t lose yourself.”

Omen kept her eyes fixed on his aged face, fine wrinkles had begun to set in on the edges of his lips and at the corners of his eyes. She normally only saw him outside, she mused, indoors no wind tickled at the layers of the fine snow-white hair on his head.

“I will endeavor to learn, instructor,” Omen said and lowered her eyes.

“Good,” he said. “I cannot be scraping my students off the side of mountains. The academy won’t send me any more should that keeps happening.”

“Hah!” Her mother barely suppressed a guffaw. “Okay,” she said. “That’s enough, old man, stand aside and let me get Octevia a bowl of soup and we can talk more about what went wrong later. You have several more years with her and I am only here for tonight.”

* * *

“Must you always stick that in people’s faces?” Omen said. She pushed Higg’s hand away, which held the sensor section of a medical tricorder.

“Yes,” Higgs said. “Everyone gets probed. Now sit still and take it like a good officer. You and Zal were just somehow just directly exposed to radiation from the anomaly — and, I’m sure you noticed, there’s an illness going around the station.”

“I’m fine,” Omen retorted and sat upright so quickly Higgs had to backpedal. Omen swung her legs off the raised biobed and planted her feet on the deck. She felt a little dizzy — snowflakes flittered in her vision for a moment — and it took a moment for her to get her bearings.

The room looked like a strange place for a biobed — and it was one of only two in the room. Lt. Zal occupied the other bed a mere two meters away, he sat passively as a medical tech wearing a blue tunic ran a medical tricorder over him and quietly probed him with questions.

Lt. Cmdr. Visco and Capt. Spellaun stood in a trio with Dr. Err, whose giant towering body loomed over them, near one of two exits from the room. The lights seemed dim for a medical workspace, and the walls were gunmetal grey instead of the standard Federation off-white that was common to the modular starships that constructed the station. That meant this room must have been from one of the honeycomb lab decks, deep within the superstructure of Acheron.

Higgs sighed and reattached the sensor. Omen sneered playfully. “This is not sickbay,” she said.

“There’s been some developments,” Higgs said. She raised a hand and waved Visco, Spellaun, and Err to come over.

They broke up their conversation and walked the short distance to spread out in a rough semicircle around Higgs, who excused herself to confer with the medical officer attending to Zal.

“How long have I been out?” Omen asked.

“Less than thirty minutes,” Spellaun said. He had changed out of his Odyssey-style formal uniform and now work the standard yet impeccable Starfleet Tactical officer tunic uniform. A simple affair made up of black panels split by red fabric triangles that made his narrower chest look wider at the bottom than the top. In addition to his uniform, Omen noticed that he wore a utility belt with a quasibaryonic-modified tricorder.

A quick assessment of the rest of the people in the room and Omen noticed that every officer had been equipped with one.

“Of course,” Spellaun said, noticing Omen’s darting eyes. “Your encounter with the anomaly within the confines of the station has prompted the need for extra safety measures for all personnel. Under the new protocol, all staff on station must work in pairs and will carry at least one modified tricorder. The data will be networked with the _Blackwell _and Omega to give us a better idea of how widespread it is.”

Omen leaned back against the biobed and took a PADD offered by Err. “I take it things have gotten interesting enough that we’re skipping the part where you ask why I broke a quarantine seal?” she said.

“You are in your own authority to investigate as you see fit,” Spellaun said. “I will leave issues of discipline to your commanding officer. Right now we need to ascertain the current situation and examine the data we have. Effects from the anomaly invading the station itself is a complication to our mission here that we need to get a quick handle on.”

She scrolled through the data displayed on the PADD, which showed an annotated, multilayer map of Acheron station with segments sectioned out revealing that the Kersting anomaly radiation had infiltrated several peripheral sections.

“And the station’s subspace fields aren’t keeping the anomaly out?” Omen said. “Why are they failing now? They’ve worked flawlessly for the years.”

Visco shrugged, and for his part, remained silent and gestured to Err to speak up.

“I reviewed the data and visuals from your suits,” Err said. “The phenomena you encountered looks exactly like an extreme form of the exotic matter infection. It also matches what the medical staff originally believed must be hallucinations by personnel. What compelled you to go into that area to find it?”

“There’s been something bothering me about this entire ‘epidemic,’” Omen said. She paced a few times in front of them while her thoughts attempted to settle. “This whole thing began a short time ago, the effects mimic the Kersting anomaly’s structure and behavior, and it’s largely invisible to station sensors. Sensors that are attuned specifically for dealing with this environment.

“It goes back to something I learned when I was training for the Andorian military and then again when I started working for Starfleet Engineering Corps.” Omen paused a moment and shook her head. “We’ve been looking at this phenomena as if there’s a lot of interconnected parts — the infected people, the test results from our experiments, the Kersting anomaly itself. What if instead it’s all one thing and we can’t tell because we’re part of the problem?”

“I don’t follow your logic,” Spellaun said. “We have been following standard Starfleet Medical protocols in quarantine and elimination of both expected and, with your attentions, the exotic as well. We have found no headway.”

Omen felt subtle pinpricks of cold on her cheek, like freezing rain during the Andorian northern-shelf springtime.

“It’s not merely interconnected,” Omen said. “To make any sense it must be the same phenomena.”

“Why did you think that the anomaly you found in the maintenance shaft was related to Kanagaki?” Err asked.

“I think I know what we’re up against,” Omen said. “I need to see him now.”

Spellaun, Visco, and Err regarded her silently for a moment — Omen knew in an instant what that meant. In her peripheral vision, Omen saw Higgs solemnly lower her head.

After a long, dreadful moment, Visco finally spoke up: “Kanagaki expired ten minutes ago.”

Omen left the room wordlessly. Nobody moved to stop her or speak. Silent and furious, she headed directly to the tubolift that would take her to the Engineering deck.


	15. Sometimes the method is the medicine

The corridor blurred around Octevia Omen as she walked. Her feet forgot the floor and her ears abandoned the sound of the door shutting behind her with its gentle shush. Hundreds of highly trained Starfleet Medical officers and an entire science research station filled with scientists and they couldn’t save one man infected only days earlier.

Numbly, she looked at the PADD in her hand. She had forgotten that Dr. Err had given it to her.

The page behind the station diagram held currently updating statistics on detected infections. Capt. Spellaun apparently never made it to the really bad news, in her opinion, the rate of infection had jumped from thirty people in the past twenty-hours up to over one hundred.

Without an understanding of the underlying condition, Spellaun couldn’t allow crew and personnel to move between the _Blackwell_ and Acheron. And, although the _Blackwell _had a stasis bay for emergency situations, it could only hold approximately ninety people. With the Operations crew working around the clock, Acheron could retrofit research bays into medical quarantine to hold several hundred people — but the onboard stasis could only handle twelve people.

The problem presented had many untested solutions. Omen asked her research team for zebras and she hadn’t explored all of them yet — one death so far was probably going to turn into many more and soon.

Her mind reeled as she used the PADD as a way to organize her thoughts and she could feel the air around her begin to chill. Years of experience with exotic engineering problems and cross-cultural training to understand complex situations still didn’t give her enough grasp to fully integrate everything she’d learned — and her lack of medical training did not help.

To his credit, Err had published some of his own findings involving wormhole interaction and particle entanglement in another layer on the PADD. Unbeknownst to her, he had roped in both Lt. Rizan and Dr. Higgs to create a multi-parallel simulation involving the anomaly’s creation of micro-wormholes and cross-compared it with other Starfleet research and data from several scientists on Acheron.

It revealed that quasibaryonic matter interactions within the anomaly did not always have devastating effects on baryonic matter of objects outside the safety of the warp bubbles. Several scientists in the station had spent years sending test samples, unshielded, into the anomaly, only to bring them back subtly or fundamentally changed by interactions.

The abstract showed that he abandoned his research the same morning because the effect of such an entanglement on organisms was never not catastrophic. Wormhole creation and destruction within the anomaly also did not match the manifestation of the “infection.”

Certainly, Err was brilliant, but Omen did not need to feel vindicated in her choices right now, so she added his revelations as another data point to her thoughts.

Something had to unify all of the cases. Then she remembered something Err had said: medical staff had reports of “hallucinations” matching what Zal and Omen saw in the maintenance tube.

“Omen to Err,” she said after a quick tap to her comm badge.

“This is Err,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“Sorry I left so abruptly,” Omen said. The apology came hard to her lips, she didn’t actually feel any need to explain, but she did feel like it was unprofessional to walk out on two commanding officers — neither of whom probably cared. In Andorian culture, it wasn’t common for someone experiencing great emotional turmoil to leave or shut down otherwise their passion could lead to violence. All andorians had two kinds of hearts of passion: one that understood compassion and one that embraced adversity — the fire and the ice.

“I understand you and Ensign Kanagaki were close friends,” Err said matter-of-factly. “We will see time to mourn him. What can I do now?”

Omen reached an intersection in the corridors. She realized with a suddenness that she had let herself get lost, her intuitive sense of direction within the station had vanished in her exhaustion. The need for action, with no direction, made the corridor — empty of all life and activity — seem like an open rebuke to her failure.

“Tell me more about the hallucinations reported to medical staff,” Omen said.

“Of course,” Err said. “Although all ‘infected’ individuals become comatose immediately, and have no symptoms before collapsing, I have seen numerous reports by uninfected individuals who have reported to staff that they witnessed glowing effigies walking through the halls, entering or exiting empty rooms. Investigation of the reported locations revealed nothing on sensors.”

“And reports match what Zal and I witnessed in maintenance?”

“Yes,” Err said. “Reports are uncanny descriptions of what you describe. I am sending the data regarding the locations reported to your PADD now. The sightings tend to orient statistically with the periphery of the sections of the station invaded by the anomaly radiation.”

“Thank you,” Omen said. “I will review the data and get back to you. Please assist Lieutenant Rizan with her current assignment — I see that you two work extremely well together. I’ll get back to you shortly. Omen out.”

By staying motionless, Omen’s internal sense of direction slowly returned to her. If she turned left, she would find that the grade of the floor slowly incline and twist as it led to the Operations center — her usual command and haunt with alarms giving her direction and purpose. Straight would lead to the floor’s mess hall, empty except for tables with built-in replicators to provide food and drink. Turning right would lead to the turbolift access to crew quarters.

Quasibaryonic matter. Wormholes. Nervous systems. Entanglement. Tetryon radiation. The intrusion by the anomaly. (In Operations there would be alarms telling her where to go and what to fix.) Her mind flickered back to her instructor, Shrihral, handing a burnt-out Phaser relay.

“I’m missing a link in this chain,” Omen said to nobody. What does everyone on this station experience that we all take for granted on a daily basis?

Wordlessly, Omen turned right — towards her crew quarters.

She tapped her comm badge. “Omen to Higgs.”

“Are you okay?”

The comm signal attenuated her voice by a bit, but Omen could still feel the concern tightening its grip on her friend’s throat as she spoke.

“I’m fine,” Omen said. She could feel the passion in her chest swell as she spoke — she wasn’t fine — but that’s not what Higgs needed to hear. “I do need you to keep people from checking up on me for three hours. I have an idea that I need to test. I need privacy.”

Higgs voice lowered. “You’re not going to irritate everyone, are you? I heard about that.”

Omen chuckled — an unexpectedly cheerful sound given her stress — as she stepped into the turbolift.

“Crew quarters,” she said. “No, Higgs, I am not going to blast everyone with tetryon radiation if I can help it. Can you keep the captain and commander busy for a while? I am going to hide from sensors for a few hours.”

Omen could hear her friend’s voice catch, but she knew her too well.

“You got it,” Higgs said. “They’re caught up in their own business at the moment and assume that you need time to yourself anyway. I won’t tell them otherwise when you drop off the grid.”

“Thank you,” Omen said. “Omen out.”

* * *

Omen kept her quarters spartan and without much decoration. A visitor might think she had an interesting fixation on Andorian culture — as the one wall visible upon entry had an Andorian House banner hung on it with a pair of ushaan-tor blades set on a table amid its drapes.

The banner depicted the glyph of the House of Crescendo and bore her _zhen_ mother’s crest — the Zh’rhyrran Warguide — a stylized mountain range peeking through a blizzard with a single figure atop with an elongated kal’hris axe held aloft. The upper part of the banner consisted of Andorian symbols corresponding to musical notes, Octevia could hear the song trill in her mind as her eyes scanned down the banner.

She carefully removed the ushaan-tor from the banner’s folds and set them aside. They were the same blades she had been given when she began her training at the military academy on Andor. They still bore the scrapes and scars of their hard work in her hands. Although they were important, they were also a distraction for curious eyes.

She pushed the snowy-white silk material of her House banner aside and revealed a plain, black box that to the casual observer was only a pedestal for the ushaan-tor. Omen, however, had installed a sensor damping field generator to hide a power source and a transporter buffer inside. By humming the first stanza of her family song and a particular line afterward, it would materialize one of the items within.

Today Omen would call up something extremely important to her — something that, if discovered, could get her cashiered out of Starfleet. It wasn’t just the technology within that could be considered contraband — but also the reason for it, the very teptaline that flowed through her arteries and veins and the hallucinatory snow that she could see drifting in her vision right now as paranoia wracked her brain as she steeled herself for what would come next.

So, she had to take precautions.

“Computer,” she said aloud. Although all computer commands went through Omega, Omen was one of the few who knew that Omga’s access controls could be circumvented by addressing lower-order processes. “Execute Omen Delta-Three-Six-Nine.”

“Internal sensors offline,” the computer said aloud and the lights in her quarters dimmed momentarily. Every quarters she occupied, Omen added this command, a subtly paranoid act that allowed her to stay “off the radar” when she chose.

Knowing her privacy would be protected, Omen laid her hands by her sides, looked up at her family’s banner, and hummed the song to herself. The untranslated lyrics would sound gentle and demure to outsiders, but to an andorian (and to Octevia) they told a succinct and brutal story about the indomitable strength of the heart and spoke passion to power — the rage of the fire against the chill of the snowstorm.

A device materialized atop the box. At first glance it looked like a fragile helmet, consisting of delicate silver wires that intertwined in a filigree between white rounded metal ribbons. The ribbons supported a pair of flesh-toned blue antenna that shifted from a color matching Octevia’s complexion to a pale Andorian blue. The attachment had been carefully crafted to match Omen’s skull shape exactly and the underlying technology allowed the metal parts to hide easily beneath her hair, whereas the fleshy portions would adhere to her skin and provide a natural appearance without the need for makeup.

The antenna felt warm to the touch as she gently reached down and let her fingers run down their length.

These were prosthetics for andorians who had lost their antenna in accidents or warfare. A relatively new technology, based on improvements created for VISOR technology for other species, the prosthesis had not seen much use in Andorian culture until a mere hundred years earlier. Although most andorians could regrow their antenna, sometimes significant damage could make that impossible — or dangerous — especially when the injury happened to the very young and destroyed the basal pluripotent cells within the skull.

It had also taken Andorian culture some centuries to start to attend to the disabled in a manner that accounted for their dignity. Andor’s warlike past was fraught with examples of the blind and otherwise infirm abandoned by their communities unless they otherwise possessed important skills. However, the influence of the value of other Federation worlds and a historically recent reproductive genetic crisis had led to a fundamental shift in the value given to otherwise disabled members of the society.

Although, even out-species adopted children — who became legally and morally andorian in all rights belonging to a given House and clutch family — were seen a little more often in the misty cities of Andor. Although, a non-biological andorian joining a military academy was still a strange feat. To the credit of her instructors, and her cohort at academy, Omen felt she was treated with respect and honor for her accomplishments (with the occasional jeers of “pink-skin” or other equal stinging epithets thrown at her — which she met with words or violence as ritual approved).

With her fingers touching the prosthesis she could briefly hear the voice of her fathers and mother congratulating her about the victory of her graduation from military academy as they presented it to her as a gift.

A gift that finally made her feel fully andorian along with her parents and with the rest of her family—

Today it would be a solution to the problem that killed her friend, Kanagaki.

It would interact directly with the parts of her brain that were androian, which included the organs and kindling for proper antenna, but being mostly human she would never grow antenna herself.

Wordlessly, Omen took the prosthesis in her hands and lifted it onto her head like a crown.

For this part, she had to close her eyes.

The synaptic interface _hurt_ — burning like fire on her scalp and through her brain as it connected. Behind her eyelids, Octevia saw light explode across her vision and sear through her optic nerves as her head felt like her brain was too big for her skull — she placed her hands on the floor and steeled herself, trying not to dig her nails into the carpet. The sensation of incandescent thought ignited down her spine and reached into each of her fingers and toes, spreading like a roaring liquid through her entire body—

She opened her eyes into a snowstorm. The cold brought on by the fire in her veins and her quarters changed completely.

The bare walls and unadorned surfaces appeared rimed with subtle gradations and patterns of light not in the visible spectrum. The air itself buzzed with sensation as currents moved around Omen, she could see eddies and swirls twirl around her lazily as she began to rise, testing her limbs. She felt more complete — correct — as if her sense of balance or even sight had been restored after a long time listless and lost in the dark.

When her fingers touched the door, the material sang. She could feel the subtle warping in the door — much like what happened to the access hatch at the maintenance seal in the upper mess hall. In fact, with access to her antenna, Omen realized she could feel the warping all around her as if the station itself had been bent around some unseen point and the very space itself twisted with it.

Still shaken from the experience of attaching her prosthetic, Omen knew she didn’t have a lot of time to orient and organize her thoughts. The door opened before her with a soft _woosh_ — a sound amplified a thousandfold by the psychological effect of the prosthesis — and she stepped out into a blizzard.

Unlike the usual nature of the snowstorm that inundated her senses when her adrenaline was high, though, the snow had taken on a new shape, with more nuance and information. With her antenna, Omen could discern patterns in the snowflakes, movements that would have seemed only elements of the chaotic warning about danger.

Now she could “feel” that the cold wind turned awkwardly against the alignment of the corridor, following a gradient that would lead her to one edge of the station — and up several decks — towards the “north” part of Acheron.

Addressing her mental map of the station, that would lead her directly to the warp field generators that kept the anomaly at bay.

“You wanted your weak link?” Instructor Shrihral’s voice echoed in her head. “What’s one thing everyone is affected by, but everyone takes for granted?”

Omen frowned and nodded to the empty corridor. She checked the algorithm that would keep her hidden from the station sensors by tapping it up on her wrist display and headed down the hall towards the turbolift that would take her to the Warp Core and Control Operations decks.


	16. Turn your frailties into weapons

With her antenna, Omen found herself thinking at lightspeed. Her body felt like it moved so slowly as she pushed herself to run faster through the empty corridor — and she could tell it was truly empty now.

The antenna afforded her a multitude of extra senses, including greatly amplified sensitivity to bioelectric and neurogenic fields. Under normal circumstances, this meant she could tell the exact locations of nearby station personnel — but, in addition to the snowstorm imagery dominating her vision, she could feel another, more diffuse, undirected source of neural energy.

The phenomena appeared to start with Kanagaki and he became its first victim.

From everything she had learned, it appeared to have a direct connection to the Kersting anomaly and its chaotic subspace rupturing effects that raged outside the station. The entire station had been dedicated to its apprehension and study — and certainly, there were no few projects running that could have catastrophic effects on personnel if left unattended. Of course, anything with any sort of neurogenic application had been locked down in the early hours.

As she passed an intersection, her motion painstakingly slow as her thoughts drove her through every conversation in the past four days, Omen felt a flicker of tension fluttering on the periphery of her attention and she began to turn her head.

There, standing in a cross hallway, approximately ten meters away, she saw the glowing simulacrum of a humanoid nervous system standing idle. The diaphanous kaleidoscopic tendrils of light that wound and twisted through its form stuttered as it began to step away from her. The vision of the anomalous form came with a sensation similar to the grating whine heard during Rizan’s experiment.

Before Omen could turn her entire body towards the flickering manifestation of a nervous system, suffused through with the tumbling Kersting prismatic energies, it vanished into a pool of purple radiance.

Somehow, Omen already had her tricorder in hand and she looked down at the readout. Tetryon radiation followed by a dissipating damping wave of quasibaryons carried in the wake of the anomalous figure’s passage. Like a rock striking the surface of a pond to vanish beneath the surface and leave only subspace ripples behind.

Her access to the station computer was greatly restricted because of her use of the signature damping field to stay off the sensors, but Omen had prepared for this as well. Using her wrist pad display — an agonizingly slow endeavor — she began to laboriously code an algorithm that would format the current data on the infectious phenomena to display correlations between the hallucinations witnessed by the non-infected and the now-infected.

The turbolift ride felt interminable, but it gave Omen time to think and modify her duty phaser. The standard Starfleet phaser was based on an Andorian prototype, which her instructors had taught her to dismantle and maintain with her eyes closed, so it was easy for her to modify it with a new phase decoupler and collimator that could introduce tetryons to the focal beam.

Her wristpad signaled her that it had finished the data survey near the end of the turbolift journey and she lifted it to look at the results.

The hallucinations reported started with staff in the upper decks — closer to the warp field generators — and as the timeline extended started being seen by personnel who worked in the periphery of the station. The infected individuals started with Kanagaki, who interacted with the warp engineers, and then started to spread to other people who had proximity with those experience “hallucinations.”

If this were an infection, it was a two-step process, that involved a contagion or environmental effect — undetectable by the sensors, perhaps due to entanglement or extradimensional intersection — that affected one person as a carrier and then passed to another who became the host.

Having witnessed the anomalies, that could mean that anyone who came into proximity with her or Zal could become hosts next. The crew needed to know this immediately and Omen also knew she needed to reach the source before they felt the need to contact her. This had to happen fast.

Ending her meditation, Omen let her thoughts and reality slam back together as she tightened her grip on the phaser.

“Begin narration,” Omen said out loud. Her wrist pad beeped an affirmative and she began to relay all the information she collected on her journey. And she began to understand another thing — Shiral’s admonition of the “weak link,” which included why the station sensors could not detect the anomaly. Everything suddenly seemed so simple.

“Station sensors cannot see the anomalous behavior because the warp fields that protect us from the Kersting anomaly are at the same phase as the station sensors,” she added, “and both are now _out of phase.” _Earth-born humans would call this the “fish can’t see water” problem, she mused, a phrase she recently heard from Kanagaki and Higgs; also something Visco and Spellaun probably wouldn’t understand, so she wouldn’t add it to the report.

It all made sense now — she glanced at her weapon — and all because of an old lesson involving a broken phaser and a grumpy instructor.

“Computer,” she said to her wrist display, ending her silence. “Please send this information immediately to Doctors Err and Higgs, as well as Rizan. Annotate with data regarding the presence of tetryon radiation and nucleonic life forms. Terminate connection after acknowledging.”

“Operation complete,” the computer voice said from the wrist pad. “Connection terminated.”

Omen leveled her phaser moments before the turbolift doors opened.

She didn’t know what she intended to do with the phaser — she didn’t even know if shooting the anomalous figures would have any effect — but between her military training and the ice storm fueled by adrenaline and teptaline raging around her, she had no desire to take any chances.

The Warp Engineering Bay was one of the largest open spaces within the station. It was one of the few modules of the station that wasn’t a repurposed starship. Instead, it was an industrial module created from duranium alloy plating surrounding five warp core columns arranged in a pentagram, bridged together with a modulation system in the center that kept the cores in standing Perleberg resonance.

Unlike the rest of the station, the Bay’s design was industrial and pragmatic, built on deck plating that clanked under Omen’s boots when she stepped out of the turbolift. The sound of the warp cores thrummed around her as she tried to take in the vision of the place. She rarely visited this bay; most of its operations were automated and it was attended by robots to do the major functions.

The warp cores were standard Type Thirteens designed originally for the Sovereign-class starship, but exofit for station-based purposes. In appearance, they were giant columns of helictical glass surrounding an intermix chamber in the middle that governed the power output and warp-field production using a dilithium matrix and matter-antimatter conversion.

Durasteel glass portals along the ceiling revealed the prismatic afterglow of the Kersting anomaly outside of the station in all its resplendent glory. Normally those portals would be darkened to protect the sanity of the Engineers working in this section, but with nobody present, the screens were wide open, bathing the area in an eerie St. Elmo’s fire.

Omen had seen the room before — but only with her normal eyes.

Now, with her antenna, Omen could make out gradations in the warp field that bent and “pinched” around the warp cores. She could also see numerous luminous violet pools of light shimmer like tears in reality all around the cores. Equally numerous numinous figures walked purposefully around the room, interacting with consoles and equipment.

Upon her entrance, they stopped and turned to “look” at her. Some gestured, others stood completely motionless.

Omen kept her thumb on the phaser trigger as she walked slowly into the room. The figures moved out of her way as she moved and offered no direct threat — other than her phaser. One figure in particular moved its limbs to attract her attention and walked towards a regulator console near the central control core.

As she approached, the figure fled before her and those at the station gave her a wide berth. Omen wasn’t certain if this was because of her mere presence or the phaser.

Upon reaching the console, she glanced over the controls while trying to keep an eye on the crowd slowly beginning to form around her. The shimmering and shifting figures did not come closer than two meters of her and most of them did not gesture. Although the one who brought her to the console continued to point.

Something on the console display caught Omen’s attention and she sheathed her phaser so that she could pull up more information.

With practiced ease, her fingers danced across the LCARS interface and she used one panel to bring up logs for the past four days of operation, another panel highlit a series of alerts that should have been sent to her personal station in Operations — had she been in her office during this medical emergency.

Something was interfering with the operation of the Warp Field Generators designed to keep the Kersting Anomaly’s violent energies at bay. All of the warp cores now had a subtle misalignment and the warp field was pushing the entire station _into_ subspace instead of pushing subspace _away_. At the current rate of change, it wouldn’t do anything to the station for years — but the other symptoms, however, would still prove to be very problematic for the crew, rendering the station uninhabitable if not handled.

From the looks of it, some engineer had attempted to start a purge of the warp cores to realign them but that process had been halted days earlier — and it wasn’t recorded in the logs. Glancing at the name of the engineer, it was a woman who had become “infected” shortly after Kanagaki.

She had also queried one of the science sections for a deep scan of a specific section of the Kersting anomaly. That report had come in from a fully automated research division and it revealed that the misalignment of the warp field appeared to have two focal points: one inside the station and one outside the station.

Quickly calculating the coordinates of the second focal point, Omen inclined her head and turned towards a plasteel window to her left. There, an indeterminate distance into the roiling energies of the Kersting Anomaly, she could see a vivid purple iris of incandescent light. According to the report, it was stable, unlike the rest of the Anomaly, and had become entangled with the warp field which generated the misalignment.

“I think I know what to do,” Omen said.

She let her gaze drift back to the silent crowd of ghostly figures standing around her. Their bodies filled with twisted energies as spectrums of light twined through them. She couldn’t get an easy count of their number, but somehow she guessed they would equal the total number of “infected” crewmembers who had succumbed to the exotic matter anomaly.

The correlation between the humanoid figures and the crew seemed to likely to be anything except that. Until now, they seemed like ghosts — perhaps manifestations of entanglement — but it struck Omen that her meeting with the ghost in maintenance and Kanagaki’s death seemed too much a coincidence.

“I don’t know if you’re my colleagues or if you’re aliens,” she said. “But, if I get this wrong, I’m sorry.”

She tapped her comm badge.

“Omen to Spellaun and Visco,” she said. “Please gather everyone and meet in Operations in fifteen minutes. I have determined a course of treatment: we will need Schrodinger’s Cat and the Schrodinger-C’Ruris Effect Detector.”


	17. A spoonful of tetryons helps the medicine go down

Cpt. Spellaun and Lt. Cmdr. Visco both looked grim as Lt. Octevia Omen reported her findings — carefully excising much of how she came to her conclusions — and showed them the location of the apparent anomaly within the Kersting Anomaly according to the records kept by the Engineering Bay team.

Also in attendance, standing and sitting variously, were Dr. Err, Dr. Higgs, Lt. Rizan, and Schrodinger’s Cat, her tail idly sweeping back and forth as she watched the proceedings.

Omen had joined them in the Operations Command Center — which was on the same deck as her office in Operational Safety — after she had properly stowed her prosthetic antenna and diligently erased all traces of her activities from the station records. She thought she’d given herself enough time to recover from using her prosthetic, but she ended up arriving late anyway, but nobody seemed to notice that she seemed groggy or disheveled.

She chalked that up to everyone already being on edge. Nobody was coming through this adventure unscathed.

“How is it that we did not get this information earlier?” Visco asked.

“I suspect we didn’t know this was happening because it wasn’t related to our medical emergency,” Omen said. “And, the engineer on duty who had discovered the problem and requested research to begin the correction, Lieutenant Ann-Marie Orji, was the second person after Kanagaki to get infected. So it went unreported when the station went into lockdown and the Engineering Bay was shifted to fully automatic.”

Spellaun nodded at her answer and waved it away with a gesture.

“We have also received a report from Doctor Err and Lieutenant Rizan that the spread may be connected to a carrier-host contagion,” Spellaun said. “How do we use this information to stop it from infecting other crewmembers?”

“If I’m right about this,” Omen said. “We won’t need to. We will, however, need to go through decontamination. Starting with the people who have been affected who are currently in medical quarantine. In fact, we should start that now before we attempt to close the… Anomaly in the anomaly.”

Omen turned back to the display screen that dominated the Operations Command Center and nodded to Dr. Higgs who tapped a few keys on a nearby console.

The screen flickered for a moment and then displayed an image of the Kersting Anomaly from an outside view, displaying the giant spiraling storm of radiant energies that surrounded the rapidly spinning singularity in the center. The visualization dove inwards towards Acheron Station and stopped suddenly to display the station in the center with a purple dot orbiting approximately 33 degrees off the station’s beam.

“Here,” Omen said. “This is a subspace rupture that I can confirm is present using Err’s theorems regarding rapid wormhole evaporation. It also matches the type of interdimensional intersessions that occurred during the phase-space experiment using Rizan’s subspace bubble generator in quarantine. I believe it’s the source of the quasibaryonic matter that I originally detected.”

“So your hypothesis is?” Spellaun said.

“What we’re seeing is some sort of unknown nucleogenic life interacting with the nervous systems of crew members,” Omen said. “It’s probably emanating from the quasibaryonic rift and getting ‘stuck’ to crew members because the warp fields around the station are pushing us deeper into subspace.

“We will need to use a subspace bubble around all affected crewmembers to push them back into normal space to decontaminate them and then close the rift. Now that I understand a little more about the nature of the entanglement, we can use the tetryon radiation generated by Schrodinger’s Cat’s detector to close it. It is my belief that tetryon radiation is destabilizing to the rift and the nucleogenic life forms.”

“If that’s true,” Err said. “Then if you had used the detector on the infected crewmembers it could have killed them.”

“I suspect that’s true,” Omen said solemnly. “I’m glad I did not rush into that now. I noticed that tetryon radiation is generated when the anomalous forms move between dimensions, but I think it’s a byproduct of the entanglement. I don’t know what will happen to the infected individuals when we close the rift — but I can surmise that if we don’t close it, there will be more.”

“What’s the connection between the hallucinations and the infections?” Visco asked.

“I can answer that,” Err’s growly saurian voice rumbled. “From what we have determined, the phenomena has a neurogenic field component, which directly affects the nervous systems of most sentients onboard the station. As a result, the carriers optic nerves are slightly out of phase with local subspace. This means that they themselves, anyone who can see the anomalous figures, have the nucleogenic contagion which they pass onto unaffected individuals. Those individuals then succumb to the second stage of the phenomena.”

“What are our options?” Spellaun asked.

“That’s where Schrodinger’s Cat comes in,” Omen said, gesturing to the black caitain woman wearing the blue uniform standing at the back of the room.

“Schrodinger-C’Ruris Effect Detector is at your disposal, Lieutenant,” she said with barely restrained glee. “The only problem I foresee is that it is a small-scale prototype and doesn’t have the power output to project a field large enough to envelop the rift. It will need to be attached to a ship’s deflector or a substantially larger field projector to get the job done.”

At that Rizan cleared her throat. “Uh, Captain, if I may interject.” Spellaun nodded so Rizan continued. “I believe the _Blackwell _has what you need, Cat. The vessel is equipped with an experimental heavy polaron weapon that was decommissioned when she was retrofit into a research vessel. It’s basically an extremely large field projector that can draw directly from the ship’s warp cores.

“If I can beam back to the _Blackwell_ with the detector, I can probably have it operational within an hour.”

Having seen what the little orion woman could do with equipment, Omen had zero doubts in her mind that she could do exactly that.

“You will need to wear a subspace field inhibitor,” Err said. “Just in case you are a carrier of the nucleogenic contagion. It will prevent its spread to anyone else you might encounter.”

“May I accompany you to the _Blackwell_ to oversee the installation?” Cat asked.

“If she also wears an inhibitor, there will be very little danger,” Err said.

“Please proceed immediately,” Spellaun said.

Without another word, Rizan and Schrodinger’s Cat filed out of the control room, chattering happily with one another as they passed into the hall.

After they left, Spellaun turned his attention back to Omen. From his position sitting in the command chair, he looked up at her and pressed his hands together in his lap.

“What about the anomalous entities you have described,” he said. “Do we have a hypothesis as to what they are? Do we need to deal with them?”

Omen shook her head. For all her extensive examinations of the data and her knowledge of warp-field and quantum physics, she couldn’t say one way or another what the manifestations of the luminous nervous systems walking around the station might be.

“I have to admit I’m not sure what they are,” Omen said. “My instinct is that I met Kanagaki in the maintenance corridor before he died. I believe, if Rizan and Err’s suspicions turn out to be correct, that they are reflections of an interdimensional-phased entanglement caused by the interaction of the nucleogenic rift and the misaligned subspace field here in the station.”

Spellaun turned his gaze to Err whose saurian features reflected no change whatsoever.

“There is very little information in the literature to go on, sir,” Err said. “Lieutenant Omen has perhaps the best supposition that I could muster. I have not witnessed these phenomena myself, nor have we been able to record them accurately on sensors. If we had more time to study them, perhaps we’d come to better conclusions.”

“Although I am sensitive to the need for scientific discovery,” Spellaun said. “In order to study them, we would need to let this situation continue and that could lead to more loss of life. We will have to proceed with Lieutenant Omen’s plan with the field projector.”

“Agreed,” said Err.

“There is one more thing, sirs,” Omen said.

“What is that?” Visco asked.

“After we collapse the nucleogenic rift and realign the subspace fields so that the Kersting Anomaly is pushed out of the station, we will need to reinforce the deflector shields around the station with tetryron particles. This may not prevent a similar rift from forming in the future, but it will prevent it from affecting the crew again.”

Visco nodded in agreement. “I understand. I will add that to the duty roster. Please add that recommendation to your report when this is all over.”

“Of course, sir,” Omen said. “If there are no other questions. I would like to watch the proceedings from the Quarantine Bay. If I’m needed, I will be on comms.”

Visco shook his head and let his gaze drift over to Spellaun who also shook his head.

“You are dismissed, Lieutenant,” he said.


	18. Victory is sometimes laughter

Lt. Omen knew she would not find Kanagaki in the Medical Quarantine Bay. His dead body would be in a special stasis chamber connected to the morgue for biocontaminated specimens — an undignified end for a man who worked hard to keep the station running.

It would fall on Lt. Cmdr. Visco to contact his family and give his condolences for the loss of their son and brother. She considered that she should also put together something for his family. She had worked with him for months, after all, and struck up a friendship, albeit short a one.

Omega, and his myriad of holograms, gave her access to Quarantine without question.

The machine intelligence also materialized a nondescript stool for her to sit on in front of the single console in the middle of the room. The console had a standard LCARS readout coupled with a holographic display, which seemed a little out of place for the station, but Quarantine had been repurposed from some unknown scientist’s medical research lab so this was probably his or her preference.

Surrounded by twelve biobeds, each emanating with the flickering glow of quarantine and stasis fields, slowing the spread of the infection within their inhabitants, Omen felt the loss of Kagangaki more deeply than she did before.

She tried to put words into her report, telling the story of how she put together all the pieces too late to save him. How a multitude of moving parts had come together to run down potential solutions in a race to save the inhabitants of the station. She couldn’t bring herself to tell that story.

In her supplemental report, he included that Kanagaki’s ghost — or whatever the apparition anomalies could appropriately be named — had been instrumental in giving her the lead that led to the solution that Rizan and Cat were now implementing onboard the _Blackwell_.

Omen had resisted demanding to join them on the away team to the starship. Together, the pair had all the technical expertise needed to get the field detector operational, her presence — even supervisory — would have been entirely perfunctory and only for her own benefit.

So, instead, she had exiled herself once again to oversee the wounded and afflicted instead.

“Communication request from Rizan, Lieutenant second class, onboard the _U.S.S. Blackwell_,” Omega said.

“Put it on screen,” Omen said.

The holographic display shimmered to life revealing the green, round face of the orion woman. Her full lips parted to reveal the sawtooth shark smile of an engineer who had a brand new toy to play with. Schrodinger’s Cat, who was offscreen, could be heard commenting in muffled tones, as her black-furred tail whipped into and out of frame.

“Do you have good news?” Omen asked.

“The field detector is now in series with the experimental projector,” Rizan said. “The ship’s helm is bringing us into firing position. I thought you’d want a front-row seat to the proceedings. I’ve already let Err know that it’s time for him to shift the phase on the internal subspace bubbles of the station so that it decontaminates the nucleogenic infection. You might feel a little strange.”

Even before Rizan finished speaking, Omen thought that she could feel something shift inside her like a gentle hand pushing against her skin. A brisk cold wind puffed through her hair as she felt her adrenaline respond to the change in atmosphere. The sensation was gone as soon as she noticed, but she noticed her arm hair standing on end like she was too close to a containment field.

“Helm reports we are coming into position,” Cat said out of frame. “Rizan, could you double-check the EPS values and I will adjust manually.”

Omen heard the doors open behind her and she turned slightly to see Dr. Higgs walk into the room. Her thin, wispy frame sauntered over and she carefully placed a hand on Octevia’s shoulder in a comforting gesture.

“I thought maybe you shouldn’t be alone during all this,” she said. “You’ve been through a bit of nonsense lately.”

“What are you talking about?” Omen joked. She gestured at the occupied biobeds littering the room. “I’m not alone. I’ve got such a good company.”

“Would you like a seat?” Omega asked.

“Yes, please,” Higgs said and a stool materialized next to her.

Omen afforded herself a smile and went back to watching the screen. Rizan and Cat appeared to be bickering over some settings on the Schrodinger-C’Ruris Effect Detector. After a short discussion the pair separated, Cat remained at the controls, and Rizan returned to the firing console.

“I know you appreciate me anyway,” Higgs chided.

“Tell me this is going to work,” Omen said.

“This has to work,” Higgs aid. “Otherwise I don’t know if I can handle all the resulting paperwork.”

“We have a go signal,” Rizan said and looked offscreen, presumably at Cat, who made an affirmative sound. “The projector is ready to fire. This is your op, Lieutenant, you have command.”

“Let’s send these things back where they came from,” Omen said. “Switch to external view and fire.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Firing sequence committed.”

From the outside, the _U.S.S. Blackwell_ was not the most impressive looking vessel but seeing her still filled Omen with hope. She had the angular lines of an _Arbiter-class_ starship engineering hull, replete with the attendant heavy armor plating, but fitted with the ball-shaped saucer section similar to an _Olympic-class _vessel. Most of the starship’s lines and angles vanished under a panoply of sensors, deflector emitters, and other types of equipment housing she didn’t recognize. The heavy polaron projector, however, affixed to the ventral engineering hull was immediately recognizable.

As she watched, the cannon extended from the hull, angled itself, and swept an arc towards a region of the Kersting Anomaly that looked much like the rest of the prismatic hellscape of turbulent energies. A brilliant, blinding white, beam of radiation lanced out of the projector and into the Anomaly where it struck an invisible _something_.

The very air around her seemed to shudder for a moment and Omen could see ice forming on her eyelashes and her breath turned to mist in front of her. Higgs shivered at her side — perhaps it actually did become cold? — but she said nothing.

The impact point of the beam began to coalesce into a skittering violet puddle of nothingness. The rift seemed to pull at the Anomaly around it as if clawing to hold itself in space, crackling spiderwebs of golden light began to shudder around its sides as ripples began to flood out of it.

“I’m getting feedback!” Rizan shouted. “Trying to compensate by increasing EPS flow rate and ramping the power. Cat! What are you doing? I need more containment, we’re about to hit the safety limits.”

Cat said something inaudible and the intensity of the radiation beam increased in brightness. On-screen, the rift had collapsed almost halfway, but it now seemed to be lapping at the beam, attempting to fold around it, like a hand punched into a vat of gelatin.

“Alright!” Rizan said. “Here goes nothing. I am decoupling the safety overrides. You have a maximum of ten seconds at this output level or we will fry more than just the emitters in the projector.”

The projected beam went from brilliant white to _something-ripped-a-hole-in-space_ on the visual. The rift continued to scream and fight against the bombardment, shrinking further at its continued collapse

The sound of muffled detonation rattled through the comm — and the starboard nacelle of the _Blackwell_ flared with an intense blue flash. Half of the windows along that side of the starship went dark and small beads of green plasma began to leak out of the lower engineering hull.

“Never mind that last comment,” Rizan said almost matter-of-factly. “I just lost the entire Starboard EPS array… I am shunting through emergency power circuits, hold onto something, it’s about to get dark in here.”

“Don’t push it any further than you need to!” Omen shouted. “You’re almost at ten seconds, discontinue if you must!”

“Cat!” Rizan must have been shouting, but her voice sounded distant, smothered. “I’m losing containment! I’m going to cut the—”

Another — louder — thundering explosion cut off the comms as spiderweb cracks of golden luminescence seethed out in all directions from the rift. A stuttering purple light eclipsed the _Blackwell _and the last thing Omen saw was its hull silhouetted against the rapidly expanding blast of light. Then nothing.

The holographic display went dark.

A vibrato scream erupted in the room around all the biobeds as alarms upon alarms started going off. Diffuse purple light erupted from each of the beds and their occupants began to writhe violently.

Higgs, who looked paralyzed by what she’d seen happen to the _Blackwell_ moments before, shot to her feet and ran over to a console on one of the biobeds.

“Omega! Isolation protocol now!” she shouted as her fingers rushed over the console on one of the beds. “I think they’re all going into neurolytic shock,” she cried in frustration. “I’m going to rapidly transfuse synaptizine to get it under control.”

Broken from her own shock, Omen stood and reached for the console in front of her. The brittle sound of ice crackled beneath her feet, her fingers felt cold, and she watched as a blizzard of snow flowed through her vision.

“Rizan! Please respond. What’s happening?”

Helpless, Omen put both hands on the console — the cold stung her hands, but she didn’t care. All of her being wanted to act — to do _something_ — but both her training as an Andorian marine and as a Starfleet officer told her to stay out of the way until someone gave her an order. She was in a medical bay, which meant Higgs had command. Her best place right now was in front of this console. If she could do anything, she could do it from here.

“The synaptizine is working,” Higgs said, visibly relieved. “The neurolytic storm is subsiding. And look, their vitals are stabilizing.”

Indeed, the displays above all the biobeds began to slowly transform into readings that represented more ordinary biorhythms. The eerie glow of guttering light that used to emanate from the biobeds interiors also subsided, leaving behind the ordinary bodies of station crewmen in the tubes.

Omen walked with deliberate care over to one of the biobeds and peered inside the isolation field. “This is Ann-Marie Orji,” she said. “She’s the second crewmember to get afflicted by the phenomena. She should be almost as far gone as Kanagaki was when he died. I don’t see any evidence of the effect anymore.”

A hush fell over the room and Omen could almost hear Higgs breathing. Both of them stood, staring at one another awestruck.

A sound from Omen’s console broke the silence as a grating, static-filled exclamation came over the comms and the display flickered back to life.

“Well _kohlsh, _it worked!” Rizan shouted with barely restrained glee.

Omen and Higgs returned their gaze to the viewscreen to see the _Blackwell_ mostly intact. Bright green plasma plumes vented in curling clouds around the starboard nacelle, electrical fires appeared to dance across the dorsal engineering hull, and small bits of debris floated near the ventral hull where the experimental projector used to be.

“Damage control reporting in,” Rizan said. “We lost part of the starboard nacelle, and the primary EPS grid, and — what do you know! — it _fried _the projector emitter! Don’t you hate it when I’m right?”

Omen stared at the holographic viewscreen and just started laughing. Higgs stared at her wide-eyed and slack-jawed for a moment and then broke down and joined her.

“Are you okay over there?” Rizan asked.


	19. Victory is sometimes sorrow

Repairs to the _USS Blackwell_ took just under a week to restore her to ninety-percent performance. During that time, Omen did not see Rizan as she was busy with the rest of the _Blackwell _engineering crew putting everything right again.

Also amid that time, the crew onboard Acheron Station held a small, intimate funeral for Ens. Kinuko Kanagaki. Every member of the Operational Safety Department attended, as well as a few research scientists who had interacted with him during his duties.

Omen got to meet, and speak to, Lt. Ann-Marie Orji, who was very close friends with Kanagaki. She and the other afflicted crewmen still suffered generalized weakness from their experience, but Dr. Higgs said they could expect full recoveries within a month.

Starfleet Medical interviewed the affected crew members about what they experienced after they fell into apparent comas. Orji confirmed what Omen had already heard from Medical reports: she remembered almost nothing.

All she could speak to was a sense that she was with other people on the station and that she dreamed of doing her daily duties. Heading from her quarters to the Warp Field Engineering Bay, going about her usual routine of monitoring and trimming flow regulation and watching the health of the cores. But she also recalled, vaguely, dreaming that she’d discovered a problem and was trying — with strange futility — to get other people to acknowledge it. She also said she told Kanagaki, who suggested that the people who needed to know were in Operational Safety.

After that part of her story, Orji smiled sadly, perhaps with the recollection of Kanagaki. Instead of continuing on, she pursed her lips and went silent. Omen decided to let her have her peace and did not press the matter.

A full funeral for Kanagaki would be held once his body was taken aboard a supply transport and warped out to his homeworld. Instead of sending along her condolences with Visco’s daily report, Omen recorded her own thoughts for his family and had them sealed with his body, so that they could arrive with him.

Dr. Err remained on board and joined Schrodinger’s Cat’s experiments for the week. In fact, many of the researchers and experts from the _Blackwell _took a sort of shore leave on Acheron Station during the repair cycle and mingled among the researchers, many of them found departments they could pitch in with.

According to Err, Capt. Spellaun encouraged this any time the starship was stationed with a research colony or community. He liked to have his crew update themselves in their chosen professions and keep their knowledge as keen as possible.

The large, saurian man also hinted that Spellaun had something in store for Omen. Although he would not say what. The vulcan captain had kept to himself.

Omen submitted her reports to Lt. Cmdr. Visco, as required, and returned to her normal duties. She put Lt. Zal back to work as quickly as she could and — as was her prerogative — made the cardassian man her partner in repairs for the next foreseeable duty cycles.

She felt like she needed some sort of break from attempting to resolve a medical mystery, and he was all too happy to give her a constant blow-by-blow of the current Cardassian holonovel he was enjoying.

She also finally learned what the salvage technician was guilty of.

* * *

The _USS Blackwell_ would be departing the Anomaly in one day and Omen received a summons to Lt. Cmdr. Visco’s office the moment she woke up.

It wasn’t common for Visco to summon anyone. He was the kind of person to find you in the hallway, or in your office, or just open up a comm channel. So Omen wondered what this could mean.

Things had begun to return to normal slowly. People still avoided the mess hall where Kanagaki collapsed — even the waitstaff found reasons to work elsewhere. Omen knew there was nothing in the room that could hurt her, and the tables were all automated replicators anyway, so she continued to take breakfast there.

But, without anyone there to take up her time today, she decided she could skip it today and go see what Visco wanted.

Upon entering Visco’s office, Omen found herself caught in Cpt. Spellaun’s steel gaze. He was standing this time, with Visco sitting lazily in his office chair. Omen hesitated before walking in, but she felt no chill in the air.

“Please come in, Lieutenant,” Visco said. He rose from his seat when she entered.

That was strange, Omen mused.

“Lieutenant Omen,” he said as he walked around his desk. His freckled cheeks revealed no severity and his dark eyes remained fixed on her. “After the excellence you showed during the crisis on board I put your name in for a commendation. Sadly. That was turned down, so you’ll have to take my gratitude instead.”

He reached out his hand and she took it, instead of shaking her hand, he pulled her into a brief hug. For a moment she could feel the buzz of his cardiac monitor against her chest; it was perhaps the most intimate thing any other Starfleet officer had ever done to her in a professional setting.

“I— thank you, sir,” Omen said, a little confused.

He moved aside and she noticed that Spellaun had not taken his eyes from her the entire time. She felt unbalanced, uncertain, but her Andorian heart remained strong within her chest, even as she tried to suppress her own reaction to Visco, she still felt it trying to rebel against the captain’s intense gaze.

“Since I cannot honor you as you are due, I hope that Captain Spellaun can do so in my place,” Visco said as he took his seat again. “I discharge that duty to him.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” Spellaun said. With those words, he sprang into motion, as if one moment he were a wooden mannequin vulcan and the next a living being with words and breath.

He walked to stand in front of Omen, squaring off with her as if he intended to challenge her with ushann-tor. Omen warned her heart to still itself, letting it ride in the icy mists of Andor — he was not andorian; this was not a duel.

“Lieutenant Octevia Jennifer Omen, scion of the Andorian House Crescendo,” Capt. Spellaun said aloud, intonating her entire name carefully, sounding out each syllable as if they should be explored and examined. “In respect to your exemplary duty under my command during the recent crisis, I am compelled to offer you the position of Operations Officer aboard the _USS Blackwell_. What say you?”

Omen choked.

“I—” Omen said. “Are you sure about…?”

“If you have an objection to my decision you should tell me now and I can rescind the offer. I expect not. I am rarely wrong.”

“No, of course!” Omen barked. “I mean. I have no objection, sir. Yes. I say, I accept.”

“Good. You will be officially granted the station of Lieutenant Commander with all the duties and privileges afforded that rank,” Spellaun said. “You have held this rank before, so I expect you already know how to execute those duties. I expect you to report for duty tomorrow morning at oh-eight-hundred hours on the bridge of the _Blackwell_ to begin your tour.”

“Yes,” Omen said. “Yes, sir.”

“You are dismissed,” Visco said.

Shaking, but excited, Omen turned on her heels and walked out of the room and into the corridor.

She didn’t let herself breathe until she heard the door _shoosh _closed behind her.

* * *

“He said _what?!” _Higgs slammed both hands down on the table as Omen took a very deep sip of her Andorian whiskey — it was the strongest thing she could think of ordering from the replicator.

She rarely drank the stuff. It burned her lips like ice, but it was one of the few things that could calm the overload of teptaline rushing through her veins — the adrenaline, on the other hand, nothing could be done about that.

Omen wiped a hand across her lips, trying to stop the burning. It didn’t stop.

“I’m now the Operations Officer on the _Blackwell,_” she said quietly.

“I am so happy for you!” Higgs said, balling up her fists. “That’s huge! Good for you! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone escape from this backwater place.”

“It’s not so backwater,” Omen said. “I met you, Zal, and Kanagaki here. It’s already become home… And now I’m leaving.”

“You’re getting a station on a starship, honey,” Higgs said. “Do not. I repeat, _do not_ give that up just to stay here with us ragtag miscreants. We all got sent here for whatever dumb reason and we’ve got our own penance to do.”

“Perhaps you can come with me?” Omen said.

A long pause stretched out between them and Higgs smiled.

“I’m tempted, but no,” she said. “You should know by now, I don’t like deep space. I’d never fit in on a starship. Plus, who would keep Doctor Raddis on his toes? You know?”

“I guess he does need someone to put him in his place,” Omen said and took another gulp of the whiskey.

Omen set her glass down and looked into the purple-blue liquid, it reminded her of the Andorian sky right before twilight descended on the mountains near her home.

“I’m going to miss you,” she said. “All of you. I remember I was so angry when I first arrived, but you were one of the few people who I couldn’t pick a fight with.”

“I think everyone who comes here is angry at first,” Higgs said. “Octevia, honey, I don’t know what you did to get sent here — and you _must _know nobody comes here out of their free well. Well, maybe except the Cat did. Anyway. You’re free. You have a command! Don’t mess this up.”

Omen nodded solemnly and lifted her glass. “I won’t,” she said.

“Promise you’ll write.”

“I will.”

* * *

Lt. Cmdr. Octevia Jennifer Omen looked over her small quarters one last time. Packing up wasn’t very difficult, everything she owned could fit on one shelf — all of her commendations, her ushaan-tor blades, and her House banner — but it still felt like a Ritual of Departure to take it down, roll it over her arm, and then place them into a box.

The most important thing — her damped transporter buffer — she removed from its hiding place and secreted into her boot. She had opted to retrieve a piece of her Andorian marine uniform, a small silver tassel affixed to a small piece of fabric shaped like a mountain range that hung on her shoulder, and decided to wear it onboard the _Blackwell_ where she would accept her position.

It took her longer than she intended to turn her back on the empty grey walls of her former quarters and step out into the corridor.

She had twenty minutes to get to the shuttle bay and leave the station, but she had one last place to visit before she said goodbye one final time.

Before departing, Omen took one last, long look over her office and the control panel that had dominated her life for the past six months.

Somewhere, an alarm was going off.

For once, that would be someone else’s problem.


End file.
